Start-Up’s Profile: Tegile
Newcomer in multi-protocol SSD/HDD array with de-dupe for primary storage
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on February 14, 2012 at 3:01 pmStart-up Tegile Systems, Inc. emerged to announce the general availability of its Zebi hybrid storage arrays that accelerate applications up to 5-times and reduce storage capacity requirements up to 75%.
Unlike other arrays in its price range, the Zebi can de-duplicate cache and compress data on-the-fly making it suitable for high performance primary applications as well as secondary backup storage. A single Zebi supports both SAN and NAS environments and comes with snapshot and replication features for $1.00 per gigabyte.
Over 50 customers throughout the financial services, manufacturing, government, legal, healthcare and transportation industry sectors have deployed the Zebi as primary storage in virtualized server, VDI, file services and database environments as well as for replicated storage.
"We selected Tegile over other storage vendors because of the Zebi’s unique ability to reduce our storage footprint so dramatically while delivering excellent performance," said Andrew Rawnsley, Chief Technology Officer at Investor Analytics LLC. "With Tegile, we can leverage our storage investment more aggressively than with any other storage vendor."
Tegile’s underlying technology includes their patent-pending Metadata Accelerated Storage System (MASS), and a no-single-point-of-failure architecture that includes solid state memory and high capacity hard disk drives. 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, de-duplication, compression, snapshots, and RAID rebuilds.
"The increasing demands on storage due to virtualization are pressurizing mid-sized IT organizations where operational cost and efficiencies are particularly top of mind," said Amita Potnis, Senior Research Analyst with Worldwide Storage Systems at IDC. "To address these issues, Tegile has brought to market a storage appliance called Zebi with an extensive feature set, as well as adding primary data de-duplication. Tegile claims Zebi will maintain high performance while being cost effective and highly available."
Zebi storage arrays are available, with prices starting at $16,000.
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Company
Tegile Systems, Inc.
Headquarters
Newark, CA; development in Bangalore, India
Date founded
November 2009
Financial funding
At least $2.5 million, in June 2010; one of the known investors is August Capital that put money in a lot of storage companies (Adaptec, Mimosa, Quantum, Seagate, Symantec, etc.).
Main executives
- Rohit Kshetrapal, CEO and co-founder, was president of network admission control company Perfigo acquired by Cisco. He also co-founded Webvibe and Brience (acquired by KPMG and Syniverse respectively) and was national partner for e-business at KPMG Consulting.
- Rajesh Nair, CTO and co-founder, was CTO at Perfigo. Post acquisition by Cisco, he continued to lead the development of Cisco’s NAC Appliance products for over two years. Prior to that, he held senior engineering management and technology positions at Brience (a mobile application platform company) and Sun.
- Rob Commins, VP marketing, comes from HP/3Par, where he led the product marketing. He was previously at Pillar and StorageWay.
- Justin Cheen, VP sales and co-founder, led the UCS sales team in the Western U.S. for Cisco and sales in the Eastern U.S. for Perfigo. He was also at WebLogic, BEA Systems, and Netscape Communications.
Zebi is a multi-protocol hybrid array using on-the-fly de-dupe and compression for primary storage with three tiers: DRAM as a fast level 1 read cache, SSDs as a second level of non-volatile R/W cache, and SAS HDDs for permanent storage.
It can be used as primary storage in virtualized server, VDI, file services and database environments as well as replicated storage for backup. A single system supports block (iSCSI, FC) and file protocols (NFS and CIFS) and comes with thin replication, snapshot and replication.
The company said: "It accelerates performance up to 5X and to saves up to 75% on capacity using unique metadata management technology for caching and on the fly de-duplication and compression in primary virtualization and database environments."
At the heart of Zebi is combined a Redirect on Write (ROW) file system with Tegile's patent-pending MASS handling technology. Traditional storage systems store data and metadata together, with metadata being interspersed with data on disks. Over time, with data being modified, deleted, and rewritten, metadata becomes fragmented on disk. Additionally, certain storage system features, such as de-dupe, can cause metadata to grow rapidly. MASS organizes and stores metadata independent of the data on SSD with optimized retrieval paths. This accelerates every storage function within the system, raising the performance of near-line SAS HDDs to the level of expensive SAS or FC drives with high rotational speed.
There are six Zebi arrays:
- SS1100: single controller, 2U, 14TB raw capacity including 24GB of DRAM, 600GB on SSD, six 1GbE ports
- SS2100: single controller, 3U, 22TB raw capacity including 48GB of DRAM, 1TB on SSD, six 1GbE ports
- HA2100: dual controller, 3U, 22TB raw capacity including 48GB of DRAM, 1.2TB on SSD, twelve 1GbE ports
- HA2100EP: dual controller, 3U, 16TB raw capacity including 96GB of DRAM, 1.2TB on SSD, twelve 1GbE ports
- J100 and J200: expansion arrays to add 20TB and 28TB respectively.
Released date
February 14, 2012
Price
Starts at $16,000 with single controller
Partners
VMWare
Number of customers
50 (direct sales) including Washington and Lee University (with two arrays for 500 users), law firm Lewis, Brisbois, Bisgaard & Smith LLP (for backup in connection with EMC and VMWare ESX), and Investor Analytics LLC
Applications
Server virtualization, VDI, databases, Exchange, file services
Target market
Medium enterprises - current customers in legal, education, financial, transportation sectors
Among competitors
- Legacy: EMC, HDS, NetApp, HP, IBM
- Start-ups: Nimble Storage, Tintri, Nutanix