Tegile Brews Up Storage Solution For Rahr

Tegile Systems, Inc.,announced that Rahr Corporation has chosen its flash storage system as a replacement for an aging Dell Compellent SAN for its ability to support the company’s fibre backplane and deduplication benefits.

Rahr produces and distributes malt and other related brewing supplies to customers around the world. The company operates modern malt production plants in Minnesota and Canada, with a barley procurement and distribution business in North Dakota. Subsidiaries include craft ingredient provider BSG and Koda Energy, LLC, an environmentally friendly project in conjunction with the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community. Rahr’s computing environment supports 300 users at its main campus and throughout 15 other locations.

With its existing Compellent SAN reaching the end of its life and maxing out from a storage capacity and throughput standpoint, Rahr began to look for a replacement. The company considered another Compellent system but felt that it was ultimately build on old technology and didn’t offer the deduplication capabilities that it needed. The company considered solutions from Nimble Storage but ultimately decided to go with Tegile because of its multi-protocol support.

“We’re a fibre-backed infrastructure so we needed to purchase something with a fibre backplane,” said Todd Kmieciak, director of IT, Rahr. “We had such an investment on the fibre side – Fibre switches and all the infrastructure – to go with iSCSI would have been a waste. When we looked at it, Nimble didn’t support a fibre-backed backplane so we went with Tegile, which just so happened to be the better solution; a better fit for what we needed in terms of throughput.”

One of the criteria Rahr had when looking for a replacement for its previous SAN was a solution that provided deduplication, which the Compellent unit didn’t provide. The Tegile array that the company has deployed has a total capacity of 25TB but after dedupe and compression, Rahr has reduced its storage needs by 75%, which Kmieciak describes as “one of the best parts about all of this.”

IntelliFlash integrates into diverse enterprise IT environments by supporting SAN and NAS deployments from the same array with FC and iSCSI block-level protocols, as well as NFS and CIFS file-level protocols. The company provides low-latency storage to the hypervisor while allowing users to simultaneously share files via NFS. And unlike other array vendors that at best only provide compression, data optimization also provides inline data reduction to further reduce acquisition and operational costs critical in virtual environments.

With the success of its initial Tegile array, Rahr has purchased a second unit for use at an offsite location. This second array will serve as a replication target for DR operations in addition to providing production storage for users at that site.

“Whether you’re a self-described ‘small shop’ like Rahr or a large-scale enterprise, Tegile has a storage system that is right for you,” said Rob Commins, VP marketing, Tegile. “For Rahr, it was our ability to support their investment in Fibre 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.“