Tegile recently announced two new members of its product family and an update to its software that promises to get more data centers taking their first significant flash step. This announcement addresses two challenges head-on that Storage Switzerland sees facing further adoption of shared flash storage.
The Flash Adoption Challenges
The first challenge is that flash storage is typically bought in reaction to a specific problem, like a poorly performing application or complaints from users about their virtual desktop performance. This situation leads to a point-solution purchase, often in the form of server-side flash, instead of a more strategic shared flash solution. The second challenge facing shared flash adoption is the a general lack of features that these systems offer. While most have deduplication and compression, many startups are just now adding the ability to replicate data in case to protect from a disaster.
New Entry Level Flash Systems
Tegile’s announcements address the first problem by allowing customers to start their shared flash journey with much smaller systems that are better aligned to the market. The new T3600 starts at a raw capacity of 9.6TBs and their T3700 at 24TBs. But both of these systems can still be expanded to support effective capacities of 1.4PBs and 1.5PBs respectively (with deduplication and compression).
These systems are ideal solutions for data centers looking to address their pressing performance problems (at the application or environment level), while still laying the groundwork for a more strategic rollout that encompasses additional workloads in the future.
New Software Features
The Tegile announcements also include upgrades to their operating software; IntelliFlash. IntelliFlash already has a robust feature set compared to other flash competition, including deduplication, compression, thin provisioning, snapshots, clones, and replication. The 3.0 release also adds faster application-aware volume provisioning, so that volumes are custom configured for the applications they are supporting. Provisioning profiles are now included for SQL-Server (OLTP), data warehouse, virtual desktop, server virtualization, file sharing, and backup target.
Also included in this release is support for self encrypting drives. Encryption can be turned on or off for the entire array, and is enabled via the UI. Encryption, especially for flash, is a critical feature, since it’s difficult to make a truly secure erase on NAND flash devices.
IntelliCare
The final component of the announcement is improved support. These additional support capabilities leverage cloud analytics to provide proactive assistance from Tegile’s support engineers.
StorageSwiss Take
Tegile is one of the few flash-focused storage vendors that provide both All-Flash storage and Hybrid Flash storage within the same product family. In fact, any of their All-Flash systems can have hard drive shelves added to them, something we called a “reverse hybrid array”. They have taken a less glamorous approach to the market, but one that may more realistically address the current state of affairs in the data center. This announcement addresses that situation by providing a lower cost entry point for flash storage, as well as continuing to build out an already robust feature set.
Storage Switzerland in conjunction with Tegile has recently conducted two webinars, now available on demand, that discuss the state of flash in the data center and provide IT planners with assistance as to how they can more strategically deploy flash in their data center. The first, “The All-Flash Data Center, Myth or Reality?”, guides IT planners through the process of selecting All-Flash or Hybrid Flash storage systems. The second, “How To Make Hybrid Perform Like All Flash” helps IT planners that have selected a Hybrid system, or can’t afford an All-Flash System, to get optimum performance and maximum predictability from the Hybrid Storage System.
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George Crump is the Chief Marketing Officer at VergeIO, the leader in Ultraconverged Infrastructure. Prior to VergeIO he was Chief Product Strategist at StorONE. Before assuming roles with innovative technology vendors, George spent almost 14 years as the founder and lead analyst at Storage Switzerland. In his spare time, he continues to write blogs on Storage Switzerland to educate IT professionals on all aspects of data center storage. He is the primary contributor to Storage Switzerland and is a heavily sought-after public speaker. With over 30 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS, SAN, Virtualization, Cloud, and Enterprise Flash. Before founding Storage Switzerland, he was CTO at one of the nation's largest storage integrators, where he was in charge of technology testing, integration, and product selection.
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