Tegile Systems, a pioneer in primary storage de-duplication in
virtualized server and desktop environments, today announced that
Washington & Lee (W&L), a top-tier liberal arts university, is
one of the early adopters of the company’s new Zebi hybrid storage
arrays. The university is capitalizing on the Zebi’s high performance
solid state disk cache to mitigate the “boot storms” associated with
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environments. Additionally, the
university is benefiting from the Zebi’s ability to de-duplicate and
compress data on-the-fly to reduce its storage requirements by 22%. A
single Zebi supports both SAN and NAS environments and comes complete
with snapshot and replication features for $1.00 per gigabyte.
“We ran into performance problems within six months of implementing
VDI and insufficient disk I/O meant we were overrunning the memory cache
of our existing system,” said Jef McCreery, Director of Core Systems at
W&L. “We considered upgrading our HP system and looked at solutions
from EMC and Dell, but finally chose the Zebi because Tegile provided
the best performance for the lowest overall cost. In fact upgrading the
existing system would have been equal to, if not double, the cost of the
entire Tegile solution.”
Tegile Systems is pioneering a new generation of enterprise storage
arrays that balance performance, capacity, features and price for
virtualization, file services and database applications. Tegile’s
underlying technology includes their patent-pending Metadata Accelerated
Storage System (MASS), and a no-single-point-of-failure architecture
that includes high speed solid state memory and high capacity hard disk
drives. Uniquely, Tegile’s MASS manages the system’s metadata (data
about the data) on high speed media to accelerate all storage functions
including random and sequential I/O, data de-duplication, compression,
snapshots, and RAID rebuilds.
W&L is one of over 50 customers from the education, financial
services, manufacturing, government, legal, healthcare and
transportation industry sectors that have deployed the new Zebi as
primary storage in virtualized server, virtualized desktop (VDI), file
services and database environments as well as for replicated storage.
Zebi storage arrays are available from Tegile Systems, with prices
starting at $16,000.
W&L’s Mr. McCreery will present some of the lessons learned from
the university’s VDI implementation at the Storage Networking World
Conference in Dallas, Texas. His presentation, “Top 5 Storage Design
Essentials for Virtual Desktop”, is scheduled for 2:10pm on April 3rd. A
detailed case study is available online at:
http://www.tegile.com/resources/