Leupold & Stevens Opts for Tegile for Oracle Environment

Tegile Systems, Inc. announced that Leupold & Stevens, Inc., a NetApp, Inc.‘s shop for nearly a decade, has chosen its Flash Storage System as a NetApp replacement for its Oracle, Exchange, SQL Server and VMware virtualized infrastructure.

Beaverton, OR-based Leupold & Stevens builds products for the shooting sports, general and wildlife observation, and the military and law enforcement communities. The company has designed, machined and assembled precision optical instruments and accessories for more than 100 years. It takes pride in providing quality, durable binoculars and scopes for customers, earning a reputation as America’s Optics Authority. The company needed a similarly quality and durable storage solution that could support its virtualized infrastructure and Oracle suite of applications.

Leupold found that operations were beginning to slow with its NetApp array. The company evaluated a new flash-based NetApp array conducting a database performance and load test to see if it could handle its infrastructure and the results were disappointing. Leupold saw lower-than-expected 6,500 IO/s that wound up pausing all business-critical operations.

“If our storage array slows down, then our business slows down as a result,” said Josh De Jong, systems architect, Leupold. “We’re driven by the speed that our Oracle applications demand, and if our NetApp array couldn’t handle it, then sticking with NetApp didn’t make sense. It was worth the conversation to see what else was out there to get the performance that we needed.“

De Jong began looking at other vendors to see what might meet the company’s performance requirements. While he was interested in an all-flash system, it was necessary to find something that could support NFS rather than ditching the company’s investment in its current infrastructure. He decided against a tiering solution, eliminating Compellent solutions. Pure Storage presented protocol problems; and Tintri ‘didn’t make sense because of its mixed environment support rather than being able to handle an all-virtual one.

Hearing about Tegile from a local VAR, De Jong began researching the company and its products and brought in Tegile to do proof-of-concept testing with one of its hybrid arrays. Re-running the stress test that found NetApp topping out at 6,500 IO/s and 1.5Gb/s of throughput, the Tegile HA2400 hybrid array performed at 107,000 IO/s and 4Gb/s of throughput with no issues. Impressed by its better performance, lower price and deduplication capabilities that enabled a 65% data reduction of its Oracle environment, De Jong chose to implement Tegile into its production environment.

In addition to getting the throughput performance, the company needed to support its Oracle application suite. Leupold has been able to better leverage the business intelligence features of its Oracle environment because of Tegile’s inline deduplication and compression functionality. ‘Data dumps’ on Leupold’s previous NetApp solution would take up to 17 hours, causing any useful information gained ‘unusable’ until the next business day. With Tegile, business intelligence operations have been reduced to four hours. And with deduplication and compression ‘always on,’ De Jong never has to worry about it.

Leupold will be adding an extra storage shelf on the Tegile array at its Beaverton HQs, as well as installing a second unit at its Denver facility for DR purposes. The second array will be optimized with additional capacity but less flash to deliver the balance of performance and cost.

“We’re not a huge company despite having a pretty well-known product and being an industry leader,” said De Jong. “And we want to be treated like we’re important even if we’re not spending millions of dollars on storage every year. Everyone we’ve talked to at Tegile is quick to respond and is always available. Tegile has always impressed us and has never let us down.“

“Whether you’re a self-described ‘small shop’ like Leupold & Stevens or a large-scale enterprise, Tegile has a storage system that is right for you,” said Rob Commins, VP marketing,Tegile. “For Leupold & Stevens, it was our ability to support their investment in FC and our data reduction technologies. For others, it might be that they don’t have to compromise between performance and resilience when it comes to business-critical applications. The best part about Tegile is that our portfolio of enterprise storage systems provides the greatest breadth of options and comprehensive data management capabilities to ensure that our customers’ specific needs are met both today and into the future.“