Alex Chen, director, Executive XIV at IBM, and Project Manager Oscar Lavina, who works at ITNow, agree on the benefits of Cloud storage: simplicity, efficiency and access to innovation. Chen outlined some of the advantages of the company’s service alongside Lavina in an interview with theCUBE during IBM Edge2015.

“XIV as it exists today is one of our premier Cloud offerings,” Chen said. “Once you’ve gone XIV, you don’t go back because of the simplicity, the great scale. [It’s] easy to manage, easy to scale and easy to deploy. And efficiency as well — it comes with the energy star certification; the high density comes with it. Last year, toward the end of the year, we upgraded the capacity of XIV to be about half a petabyte [for] a single rack. And this year … we announced, today, the availability of real-time compression integrated with the grid architecture. And with that real-time compression, we can hold more than two petabytes of storage in a single rack and also reduce the total cost of ownership significantly.”

Benefits more than theoretical

Lavina said these benefits have been more than theoretical for ITNow, a service provider in Barcelona.

“It was back in 2012, and we needed a new storage solution … [XIV] was easy to manage, it got a lot of performance and a lot of capacity with very little footprint,” he said. “We loved it from the very first moment.”

It worked so well that the company is building its private cloud on XIV, using almost six petabytes of storage so far.

“One thing I love most [about] XIV is its consistent performance,” Lavina said. This consistency has made his life much easier. “Before, you had to do a lot of tuning on your storage to survive to the applications. And right now, we have the capacity, we put different workloads on XIV, and you forget about it. So it’s quite simple in that sense.”

He estimates that the system has freed up 25%-30% of his time, allowing him to focus on solutions and brainstorm new features — and attend conferences like Edge.

Testing goes beyond expectations

As far as the innovation goes, XIV just keeps producing. In a beta of the new compression software, customers are seeing huge benefits. Lavina saidhis company is no exception.

“Testing has gone beyond expectations,” he explained. “We expected to have a compression about 50-60%. We’ve been able to even compress data up to 93%” in specific cases — meaning companies can spend less money on storage space and more on revenue-producing endeavors since their existing storage space can stretch almost 10x further.”

According to Chen, “We are bringing a lot of value into this enterprise platform. Imagine, you stop paying several dollars per gigabyte … by just buying this software innovation that’s available on all Gen 3 machines.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM Edge2015.