Q&A with Rob Commins of Tegile Systems - Page 2
VSM: How do Tegile arrays differ from traditional legacy storage?
RC: Tegile Systems’ enterprise storage arrays balance performance, capacity, features and price for virtualization, file services and database applications. Our hybrid arrays are significantly faster than legacy arrays and significantly less expensive than all solid-state disk-based arrays.
Our software simplifies administration and optimizes storage for various applications including virtualization, file services and databases. Our hardware provides high performance at low cost: Quad-core Xeon processors, significant memory, sizable read and write caches using flash, multiple networking interfaces, dual power supplies and hot disk spares. Additionally, Tegile’s patent-pending MASS technology accelerates performance to solid state speeds without sacrificing the capacity or cost advantage of hard disk storage.
VSM: What are the biggest problems that companies face when deploying storage solutions?
RC: Today companies are implementing server virtualization, desktop virtualization, shared databases and file services -- all of which not only demand high capacity storage, but also high performance storage that can handle high volume transitions and a larger number of concurrent users. Advances in data reliability, protection and efficiency, such as RAID, compression and de-duplication, also demand better performance. As a result, IT managers need to rebalance the key requirements (capacity, performance, compatibility, usability (fit for purpose), reliability, data protection and value for money) for storage in order to maintain an efficient IT infrastructure that supports critical business operations and applications.
VSM: You are offering primary storage with de-duplication. Please tell me about that.
RC: The Tegile Zebi appliance supports in-line compression and block level de-duplication of all data before it is written to disk. It is not a post-processing batch job that is done after all the raw data is written to disk. By combining its unique technology and using high performance Xeon processors, Tegile ensures that the in-line compression and de-duplication does not add any latency to the Zebi. For backup, organizations typically store multiple copies of their full dataset, which is backed up on weekends. These full copies inherently have a lot of duplicate data. The Tegile Zebi array is able to detect duplicate blocks of data and avoid writing these duplicate blocks of data to disk. This not only saves disk space but also improves throughput speeds because the data does not have to be written again to disk. Tegile Zebi is able to offer similar benefits for other use cases such as virtual server / desktop environments where there is a lot of duplicate data.
VSM: How do your storage arrays differ from your competitors?
RC: Tegile’s Zebi line of hybrid storage arrays is up to 5 times faster than all hard disk-based arrays and significantly less expensive than all solid-state disk-based arrays. The usable capacity of a Zebi is up to 5 times its raw capacity because of Tegile’s on-the-fly data compression and de-duplication technology. Zebi provides better data protection than standard arrays with its no-single-point-of-failure architecture, built-in autosnapshot, auto-replication, near-instant recovery, on- or offsite fail-over capabilities. Zebi arrays integrate easily into both SAN and NAS environments.
