Tegile Intros First All-Flash Storage Array, Unveils New Hybrid

Hybrid flash/disk storage array vendor Tegile Systems Tuesday expanded its solution portfolio with the addition of its first all-flash storage array as well as a new hybrid array with much more room to expand the flash capacity compared with its previous models.

Tegile unveiled the T3800, an all-flash storage array which starts with a raw capacity of 48 TB and expands to 336 TB using SanDiskSSD technology, said Rob Commins, vice president of marketing for the Newark, Calif.-based storage vendor.

With the company's in-line deduplication and compression technology, which squeezes the actual capacity of data to about one-fifth its original size, that provides a maximum usable capacity of about 1.6 Petabytes, Commins told CRN.

[Related: Pure Storage Brings All-Flash Storage Arrays Mainstream With Replication]

"That capacity multiplier brings the price down to about $1.10 per GB of capacity," he said.

The T3800 is technically not Tegile's first all-flash storage array, Commins said. "The HA2800 starts at a base configuration of 4.4 TB of flash storage with no hard drive," he said. "But that's the maximum flash storage. Capacity is expanded using spinning disk."

Also new from Tegile is the T3400, which takes out about half of the SanDiskSSD capacity for a starting configuration of about 26 TB raw, Commins said. The rest of the capacity can either be SSDs from HGST, which was acquired by Western Digital, or spinning drives, he said. The HGSTSSDs are smaller in capacity than the SanDiskSSDs, but provider higher performance, he said.

"Customers can expand capacity with flash or spinning disk," he said. "They can mix or match, and bring the cost down to 60 cents per GB with disk or up to $1.30 per GB with flash."

Both HGST and SanDisk are investors in Tegile.

Bringing out an all-flash storage array such as the T3800 is something Tegile has needed to do to grab more business, said David Gottesman, principal at Epic Machines, a San Francisco-based solution provider and Tegile channel partner.

"Tegile seemed to be running into all-flash competitors, and in the process missing out on some business," Gottesman told CRN. "In any customer data set, there's active data, which is more likely to sit in flash, and the other data, which may sit in spinning drives. Often, the active data is a subset of the total data. But customers need all-flash in certain situations. This allows Tegile to sell to a broader market."

NEXT: Taking Advantage Of High-Performance Dedupe, Compression

The flexible flash and spinning disk storage configurability of the T3400 meets the varying requirements of a wide range of customers, Gottesman said.

Tegile has proven to be a good partner for Epic Machines, Gottesman said.

One of Tegile's value propositions is its broad protocol support, including support for NFS, Fibre Channel and iSCSI, as well as the ability to mix and match flash storage and spinning disk, he said.

He also likes how Tegile's in-line deduplication and compression decreases total storage capacity with little or no impact on performance.

Commins said Tegile's in-line dedupe and compression, which can be turned on or off on a volume-by-volume basis, can actually improve performance when turned on by using part of the capacity as a high-speed cache.

"Of our 500-plus customers, I think only one has turned dedupe off," he said. "It was an Oracle DBA [database administrator] who wanted to ensure maximum performance."

The TegileT3800 and T3400 are currently available, and are sold bundled with the company's IntelliFlash flash optimization software and its data management suite, which includes snapshot, remote replication and VMware-aware tools.

PUBLISHED JUNE 3, 2014