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Tegile is a storage company with interesting products declared to be “one flash (hybrid or all flash) for any workload”. For sure they are a strong company, with more than 1800 systems deployed with Tegileproducts, including interesting names including Ferrari, McLaren, Tesla, … More than 1100 customers, doesn’t sound bad, at all!

And around 360 employees worldwide and good investors (one, for example, is HGST!).

During the last IT Press Tour #17 I’ve got the opportunity to learn more about this company  and their solutions. Rohit Kshetrapal (CEO at Tegile) has introded the company with strong updates on their unique products optmized both for Hybrid  and All-Flash.

After the introduction, Rajesh Nair (CTO at Tegile) has give a product deep dive and an interesting roadmap.

Their solutions are available in two different approach: Intelligent Flash Arrays (in hybrid or all-flash configuration both powered by IntelliFlash) or prebuilded IntelliStack converged infrastructure solutions. IntelliStack combined the storage features of Tegile and the computing power of Cisco UCS to offer pre-validated, pre-sized, and certified configurations to fit a wide range of deployment requirements.

Tegile All-Flash Storage Arrays deliver maximum performance, high density,  compelling economics and it is ideal for latency-sensitive, business-critical workloads such as online transaction processing, real-time analytics, decision support, and data warehousing. It’s available in three different models:

Model T3600 T3700 T3800
Controller Memory 192GB 192GB 192GB
Raw Capacity (min/max) 12TB/300TB 24TB/312TB 48TB/336TB

The hybrid storage array models leverage the performance of flash, the density of hard disks and the rich features of IntelliFlash™ operating system to deliver a compelling storage platform that accelerates a wide variety of workloads in the enterprise. In this case there are four different models:

Model T3100 T3200 T3300 T3400
Controller Memory 96GB 192GB 192GB 192GB
Raw Capacity (min/max) 26TB/170TB 36TB/180TB 18TB/162TB 26TB/314TB

All T3xxx series are a scale-in system with dual controller and PCIe3 x8 NTB across controllers for inter-controller data transfer and configuration sync. Disks are shared with a SAS2 backbone. Each controller has 8-12 cores and 48-96GB DRAM and different type of front-end connectivity (1G, 10G & 8/16G FC).

The new T4xxx series (ETA – Feb ‘16) will provide on-board SAS3 for in-box disks and on-board NVMe (4x 2.5” SSDs), a new PCIe shared bus and controllers with 8-20 cores and 64-256GB DRAM.

All models shares the same “intelligence” called IntelliFlash. Tegile’s IntelliFlash software architectur is a fast and flexible operating environment designed to leverage different grades of storage media—hard disk, high-performance flash, high-density flash, etc.—in a single storage array. IntelliFlash understands the inherent characteristics of different storage media and intelligently manages the placement of data to deliver optimal performance (speed and latency) with the best possible economics. It also includes advanced data services, multi-protocol support, and flexible management capabilities, enabling you to significantly shrink your storage footprint, maximize uptime, consolidate workloads, and simplify storage administration.

The capability to adapt the software and the features to the new media (using a patent metadata acceleration) will permit to move to new media easy and fast when they will become interesting. But is not only capable to adapt to the right media, the software can also adapting and aligning the user workload to the right array.

The product and features philosophy is quite simple and effective: all in one, no options, everything is delivered and shipped.

But more interesting is the cloud analytics & support part. IntelliCare is a comprehensive support platform that’s driven by cloud analytics and backed by Tegile’s team of storage experts. Maybe nothing new compared to similar “pro supports”.

But the IntelliCare Flash “5” Guarantee is quite unique and make customers more confident in their purchase:

  • 5x faster performance compared to traditional storage
  • 5 years of flat support pricing with fresh flash and free controller upgrades
  • 5:1 data reduction in well-virtualized environments
  • 5$ per gigabyte of high-endurance eMLC flash
  • 5 nines availability — that’s 99.999% uptime

Analytics are actually an “internal” service oriented to improve the support team, but should be possible that more services user oriented could be added.

For the future, also if the storage actually is a scale-in architecture, some kind of scale-out models will be implemented, to arrive also to block scale-out (1H 2016) and file scale-out (2H 2016).

Of course Tegile is a storage designed for flash and virtualization is a natual user case. ActualTech Media and Tegile recently teamed up to get a deeper understanding of what’s happening at the intersection of virtualization and storage. ActualTech polled over 1,000 IT professionals to learn about the top challenges they’re facing within their organization, and how they plan to use solutions like flash storage, cloud storage, and VMware Virtual Volumes (VVols) to solve those challenges. Learn more downloading the paper.

But other typical user cases are database and there are partnership with Microsoft and Oracle. And also VDI is another great user cases, with partnership with Citrix, VMware and Microsoft.

Disclaimer: Condor Consulting Group has invited me to this even and they will paid for accommodation and travels, but I am not compensated for my time and I’m not obliged to blog. Furthermore, the content is not reviewed, approved or published by any other person than me.

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