It was true when Sir Francis Bacon said it some 400 years ago. It’s even more true now. With new markets opening and new products appearing faster than ever, and consumers increasingly holding companies to standards of convenience set by their tablets and smartphones, the business world’s need for speed has never been greater.

“There’s so much more competition and you have to be that much more nimble,” says Tom O’Rourke, vice president of sales at Essextec, an information technology and business solution provider based in Rochelle Park, N.J.

Unfortunately, one of the biggest obstacles to business acceleration lies in a place few execu-tives think to look for it: the hard disk drives in their storage systems. “Storage is the main bottleneck in today’s infrastructure,” O’Rourke says, and it’s

curbing the velocity at which companies operate, innovate, and grow.

Yet just as disk-based storage is holding compa-nies back, experts note, a newer technology is speeding them up. To achieve extreme business performance, they say, companies need the extreme storage performance only solid-state flash storage solutions can deliver.

SUPERCHARGED MARKETPLACEFor most business leaders today, that’s a far from intuitive proposition. “A lot of people don’t realize that storage has anything to do with busi-ness performance, and until the last five years it probably didn’t,” says Woody Hutsell, a business development manager in the FlashSystem product unit at IBM Corp., of Armonk, N.Y.

In today’s supercharged marketplace, however, traditional spinning disks simply can’t read and

EXTREME STORAGE PERFORMANCE EQUALS EXTREME BUSINESS VALUEHIGH-SPEED FLASH STORAGE SOLUTIONS REVEAL THAT BUSINESS PERFORMANCE AND STORAGE PERFORMANCE ARE MORE CLOSELY RELATED THAN MOST PEOPLE REALIZE.

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“Time is the measure of business.”

can become. Worse yet, he adds, the poor scal-ability of disk-based storage can make pursuing opportunities that involve large quantities of trans-actions and concurrent users all but impossible, locking companies out of promising new markets. OUTSIZED EFFECTSFlash storage systems free businesses from such constraints. Based on solid-state silicon wafers instead of spinning disks, flash drives decrease latency and increase processing speed dramatically.

“Transactions execute potentially 10, 15, 20 times faster, so things that might take 30, 40, or 50 milliseconds on a disk could potentially take on the order of less than one millisecond,” says Ray Lucchesi, president of Broomfield, Colo.-based storage advisory firm Silverton Consulting Inc.

That enormous performance boost can have equally outsized effects in areas like customer satisfaction by speeding up websites and stream-lining service calls. Hutsell cites Sprint Nextel, the global telecommunications giant based in Over-land Park, Kan., as an example. Deploying flash storage produced a 45-fold acceleration in access to billing data, their largest data warehouse. “Now Sprint operates at the same speed as their customers,” Hutsell says.

Flash storage revs up billing runs, payroll processes, and other large batch jobs too. Disk-based storage can have so much trouble handling such workloads that companies often delay them until off-peak hours. “With flash, you might complete procedures like that three to 20 times faster than before,” Hutsell states. “You can get more done in the same amount of time.”

That holds for decision making as well. By helping analytics systems sift through vast quantities of data more swiftly, flash storage empowers managers to reach conclusions more rapidly too. “Faster access to data enables faster decisions,” O’Rourke observes. And also smarter ones, because the more numbers executives can crunch before making choices, the better those choices will be.

write data fast enough to keep pace with swelling transaction volumes and user loads. Longer wait times, sluggish service, and unhappy customers are the inevitable results. “Response time is critical to customers,” notes Mike Adams, director of the storage practice at Lincoln, R.I.-based systems integrator Lighthouse Computer Services Inc. Disappoint buyers often enough and they’ll take their money elsewhere.

Nor is lost revenue the only harm overburdened disk drives can do. Decision making can suffer too. Companies today have more and more informa-tion to study and less and less time to study it, O’Rourke notes. “Anything that slows you down impacts your ability to make a quality decision in a timely fashion,” he says.

It can also limit growth. “You can compensate for the poor performance of disk-based storage up to a point by deploying massive arrays,” Hutsell says. Once workloads increase beyond that point, though, latency rises and efficiency dips. The upshot is an artificial ceiling on how big businesses

2 WHITE PAPER ➔ Extreme Storage Performance Equals Extreme Business Value

“Storage is the main bottleneck in today’s infrastructure, and it’s curbing the velocity at which compa-nies operate, innovate, and grow.”

—Tom O’Rourke vice president of sales, Essextec

3 WHITE PAPER ➔ Extreme Storage Performance Equals Extreme Business Value

Finally, flash storage breaks down the needless barriers to growth and innovation that disk-based systems too often erect. “Flash scales further and faster than hard disk drives,” Hutsell observes. “That gives you the agility to enter new markets sooner, and can even make business initiatives too big for disks to handle practical options for the first time.” OPTIMIZED FOR FLASH FROM THE GROUND UPNewcomers to flash storage must be cautious about which systems they deploy, though. All-flash solutions contain solid-state memory, but many surround those chips with controllers, backplanes, and other supporting components originally designed for disk-based products. “That’s going

to get you to reduced latency, but not to where you really take millisecond latency down to micro-second latency,” O’Rourke says.

Every component of an IBM FlashSystem array, by contrast, was specifically designed for use with flash technology, resulting in significantly higher performance. “They built their flash products from the ground up,” O’Rourke notes.

They also architected those systems to distribute processing loads across as many as 15 PowerPC processors. “That gives you more processing where you need it, so you get much higher perfor-mance levels,” Hutsell says.

The FlashSystem family is engineered for maximum efficiency too. Despite their performance edge over disk-based products, FlashSystem arrays take up less data center floor space and consume less power. They also generate less heat and therefore require less cooling. “The total cost of ownership [TCO] is much more favorable with FlashSystem than with disk-based systems when those disk based systems have been architected for performance,” Hutsell says.

Higher performance and lower cost—what better combination for today’s enterprise? “Everybody’s 24/7 these days,” Adams says. “They can’t have slow processes in their environment.” Flash storage like IBM’s FlashSystem help make sure they don’t. n

For more information, visit ibm.com/storage/flash

“Flash scales further and faster than hard disk drives. That gives you the agility to enter new markets sooner, and can even make business initiatives too big for disks to handle practical options for the first time.”

—Woody Hutsell business development manager, IBM Corp.

EXECUTIVEVIEWPOINT

The extreme performance of flash storage solutions is producing extreme results for businesses of every description. In this executive Q&A, IBM’s Michael Kuhn draws on his front-line experiences with real-world customers to explain how the unparalleled speed of flash storage empowers companies to move faster, make better decisions, and more effectively realize the promise of big data and cloud computing.

Q: Speed has always mattered in business. What factors are making performance even more important today?

A: There are many, but one of the biggest is how critical data has become to businesses, and how much more data has to managed. The big data tsunami everyone’s been talking about for a while now shows no signs of slowing down. Deriving action-able insight from all that data in real time can give companies a strong competitive advantage, so they all want to analyze information as quickly as possible. That’s just one good illustration of why the value of speed is rising.

Q: How does storage end up affecting a company’s ability to meet its performance objectives?

A: If you think about everything in the data center, almost all of it has become faster in recent years. Networking has become faster. Servers have become faster. Memory has become more powerful. Basically, everything in the data center is now better able to keep up with the pace of business except for one thing, which is storage. High-performance storage systems primarily still run on slow spinning disk drives, and that technology hasn’t changed in 10 years. Switching to flash storage enables a massive performance improve-ment, and the net result is that everything else in the data center works more efficiently too.

The Bottom-Line Impact of Superfast Storage

Q: Everyone’s talking about cloud computing these days. How does the extreme perfor-mance of flash storage help companies get greater business value in the cloud?

A: Flash helps anywhere you need to process trans-actions at a rapid pace. So think of cloud-based solu-tions like an airline reservation system or a financial trading system, for instance. Those are mission-critical online applications, and flash storage allows them to work orders of magnitude better—not 10, 50, or 100 percent better, but orders of magnitude better, because it’s radically faster than disk storage.

Q: What’s a good example of how the extreme performance of IBM FlashSystem is delivering significant ROI to one of your customers?

A: There are a lot of examples, but Coca-Cola Bottling Company Consolidated (CCBCC) is an especially good one. They’re a major client of ours that wanted to upgrade their supply chain forecasting systems from a regional level down to the store level without changing their service-level agreements [SLAs]. Think of the huge number of bottles and cans and cases of Coca-Cola products they deliver every day, and the ability to anticipate customer demand down to the store level. To make that change, remain competitive, and deliver upon their mission statement, “to make, sell, and deliver Coca-Cola products better than anyone else,” CCBCC chose the IBM FlashSystem Solution. In fact, deploying IBM FlashSystem virtualized by IBM System Storage® SAN Volume Controller, they were able to process 20 times more data within their existing SLAs and get deeper demand insights four times faster. IBM FlashSystem Solution matched manufacturing output with demand, reduced risk of over- or understocking, and enabled earlier logistics planning to ultimately increase profitability. And that’s just one example. The scenarios in which flash storage can make a tremen-dous impact are really just about infinite. n

MICHAEL KUHN

is Vice President and Business Line Executive for IBM Flash Systems within IBM’s Systems & Technology Group (STG). He is responsible for the business strategy and worldwide execution of flash optimized solutions. Through development and strategic acquisitions (Texas Memory Systems 2012), he is leading a team focused on advanc-ing the storage and systems portfolio.