Washington & Lee University Adopts Tegile Zebi RAID

Tegile Systems, Inc., into primary
storage de-duplication in virtualized server and desktop environments,
announced that Washington & Lee
(W&L), a 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 performance SSD cache to
mitigate the ‘boot storms’ associated with VDI environments. Additionally, it 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 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. Uunderlying
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. 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.