University of Northwestern – St. Paul Selects Tegile

Tegile Systems, Inc. announced that University of Northwestern – St. Paul (UNW) has updated and upgraded its storage infrastructure with an estimated $200,000 5-year TCO savings over an alternative Dell Compellent system.

UNW is a private, not-for-profit Christian liberal arts school located in the Twin Cities suburbs of Roseville and Arden Hills, MN. Founded in 1902, the school offers more than 70 areas of undergraduate study with six master’s degree programs to more than 3,300 students. With four straight years of growth in student enrollment and a Compellent storage system that was exhibiting reliability issues at the end of its service lifecycle, the university looked for a replacement that would upgrade its current feature set and functionality while remaining within the constraints of a limited budget many educational institutions face today.

“Originally, Dell was the only vendor we were going to look at just because they’ve been in here so long and they had been pretty reliable up until that last year or so,” said Chad Miller, technical director at the university. “But once we started dealing with them we realized that we were going to be getting essentially the same technology that we already had in place – it was updated and there was some new functionality but there was nothing that was really compelling. And the price point was really quite high. So we thought, ‘You know what? We need to take a step back and look at other vendors.’“

UNW needed a storage solution at a good price point that could do both iSCSI and FC, offered compression and deduplication data optimization, and could provide replication to its DR site, which at that point had been underutilized because the school couldn’t afford an additional SAN there. After a recommendation by a storage expert at its VAR, Cambridge Computing, the university decided to implement Intelligent Flash Arrays from Tegile.

Tegile’s Intelligent Flash Arrays allow customers to choose a flash storage solution that is right for them. The company’s hybrid arrays are faster than legacy arrays and less expensive that all-flash arrays to provide the balance of performance and cost for a range of consolidated and virtualized business workloads.

Going with Tegile allowed the school to get the new features it was looking for at a low price point, which enabled it to add a SAN at its DR site. Miller said the university was able to save $35,000 a year on support alone with nearly $200,000 TCO savings over sticking with Dell. The school also reduced its floor space requirements by 75% with substantial savings on power as well. In-line deduplication and compression reduced the amount of data under management by 40%. VM boot times in the 100% virtualized environment improved by as much as 20% reducing complaints from users.

“The combination of budget cuts and declining enrollment due to rising tuition costs can severely limit what educational institutions are able to do with improving their storage infrastructures,” said Rob Commins, VP marketing, Tegile. “The ability to not only refresh but improve those infrastructures is imperative for schools looking to offer students a technology-rich learning environment. We’re glad that the University of Northwestern – St. Paul, like many of our higher education customers, was able to accelerate access to student and academic applications while lowering their storage footprint and operational costs through the implementation of Tegile Intelligent Flash Arrays.“