A&P speeds Big Data access with IBM flash system

Montvale, N.J. – The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (A&P) is using the IBM FlashSystem V840 to compress live data and speed access to Big Data. The FlashSystem now integrates into a new Control Enclosure with IBM’s SAN Volume Controller (SVC) data virtualization system, a key component of IBM’s Software Defined Storage solution.



The solution includes such advanced technologies as real-time compression that compresses “live” data on-the-fly for a three-and-a-half times boost in performance from the previous version. Since the highly dense IBM FlashSystem V840 can support up to 1.6 petabyte of data in a single system, clients are able to reduce energy costs, as well as data center floor space. A&P migrated 40 terabytes of data from seven hard drive storage systems to a single V840 FlashSystem, saving the company not only data center floor space, but cooling and energy costs.



“The information we’re generating and analyzing daily is critical to the success of our business,” said Richard Angelillo, VP, IS at A&P. “By moving our storage and Big Data efforts from spinning disk to the new IBM flash solution we’ve improved latency issues from as much as 27 milliseconds to microseconds.”