SVA Software was set up earlier this year to bring a mature German software product to North America through the channel.
Don Mead, SVP Technology & Partner Development at SVA Software
SVA Software, which makes storage performance management software for IBM systems, has announced the latest version of that software, BVQ. They have been demonstrating it at IBM’s Edge event in Las Vegas.
While SVA Software is a new company, which only incorporated in February this year, it is a subsidiary of the largest IBM systems integrator in Germany, SVA, and the product itself is a mature one.
“SVA originally created BVQ ten years ago for their services organization to fill a gap in storage management for virtual data centres, and sold it as a service for five years,” said Don Mead, SVP Technology & Partner Development at SVA Software. “They then turned it into a software product, and it is now in Version 4. But it has been sold almost entirely in Europe. It was only this year, when they decided to expand in North America with a channel strategy, that SVA Software was created.”
Mead said that the response to SVA Software at IBM Edge has been exceptional.
“This is my first event with SVA and the people I have met are so excited about the product,” he said. “I spent a lot of time with the IBM product development people and they wanted to hear more. They immediately saw the value in what we do.”
Mead pointed out that while BVQ itself is not new, it is basically new in North America.
“People are just learning about it now,” he said. “The IBM product management people also weren’t familiar with it, because product management people tend to be focused on their own products. With other traditional tools, if you do a lot of analysis you have to dig through numbers, like with a spreadsheet. The IBM people were astounded how easy it is to get detailed information in real time.”
BVQ is an expressly IBM product, for IBM’s Spectrum Virtualize family – IBM SVC, IBM FlashSystems, IBM Storwize, VersaStack – and all existing and new heterogeneous storage. It uses proactive monitoring, continuously collecting data for on-demand and scheduled analysis while also working to identify issues before they occur. BVQ delivers operational intelligence from the SVC performance data for more informed business decisions, while aligning business requirements with correct assets. It is available as an on-prem software implementation, as a service, or by subscription.
“VMware integration has been newly added into the product for this release,” Mead said.
Mead also emphasized that the whole look and feel of the product have been improved in the new release.
The dashboards within dashboards in the new version of BVQ
“We have enriched the interface quite a bit, notably with multiple dashboards,” he said. “These are interactive dashboards nested within each other. In the past, people would have to open another window to look at things like node performance when they saw a spike. Now they can do it all within a single pane of glass. It’s a very nice troubleshooting tool.”
Mead said the big push SVA is making at Edge involves a free limited time offer for a health check assessment.
“Using BVQ’s offline scanning capabilities, they can use this for a week, and get back an assessment report on their infrastructure,” he said. “The top findings are highlighted, like bottleneck analysis, as well as how well things like thin provisioning and compression are working. They may find some features they are paying more are delivering little return the way they are being used.”
In the future, Mead said they will be charging for this – and he said some partners would like him to start charging for it now – but they intend to offer it for free for the next six months or so, to show off the software’ capabilities.
Mead emphasized BVQ is a win-win for IBM partners.
“It simplifies storage performance management and is complementary to everything IBM has today. It doesn’t replace anything of theirs. It also fits into all environments, whether 100 TB or 20 PB.”
