Renal Ventures Management Invests in 9TB Tegile SSD Array

Tegile Systems,
Inc. announced that Renal Ventures
Management, LLC has
installed its Zebi HA2100 hybrid array to meet its need for higher IO/s
demands of a virtualized server environment.

The Zebi array with 9TB of solid state storage is configured as NAS running
the NFS protocol as part of a recent server virtualization initiative to
migrate its HP servers to Xenserver and XenApp. Renal Ventures discovered that
its incumbent HP storage arrays were inadequate for the higher IO/s demands.

Renal Ventures, provider of dialysis services, providing
management expertise and patient-focused care operations to a network of clinic
partners around the country, considered upgrading to HP solid state storage as
well as alternatives from EMC and NetApp. But on the recommendation
of Citrix, the company evaluation also included hybrid storage arrays from
Tegile.

"Renal Ventures currently has five
VMs running under XenServer and the Tegile storage has performed just as
promised during the sales process", said Randy Casterlin,
Citrix/Windows server engineer, Renal Ventures. "In the evaluation against other storage vendors, there were three main
factors that tipped the scales in favor of Tegile: performance, flexibility and
– surprisingly for a start-up – the reputation of the company."

Casterlin said that Tegile offered the best value proposition with the required
IO/s performance to support the Citrix virtualized environment but without the
high price of other products that would cripple efforts to deploy a
well-balanced IT environment without glaring bottlenecks.

"We really like the performance, but
we discovered that a lot of best practices are put by the wayside in favor of
budgetary constraints. We didn’t want to have a bottleneck with the storage and
Tegile made it very cost-effective for us to get into a very nice
high-performance NAS. We found we really didn’t have to scrimp like we thought
we would and have everything else be fully powered – solid HP servers, plenty
of RAM and processor power – only to be crippled by a storage IO/s bottleneck.
We really didn’t want to put ourselves in that position."

The flexibility and future-proofing built into the Zebi were distinct
differentiating advantages, according to Casterlin. The Zebi architecture not
only supports multiple storage protocols, but simultaneous connections of FC,
iSCSI, NFS and CIFS. It supports 1GbE and 10GbE and 8Gb FC. Tegile also
offers Zebi expansion arrays with 18, 26 or 72TB of additional storage,
protecting the initial investment in Zebi hardware while sustaining a
customer’s growing storage environment.

"We really like the flexibility,"
said Casterlin. "Right now we’re using NFS but down the road we may want
to use CIFS or iSCSI. Being able to make those decisions quickly and not having
to purchase something new or an add-on having it all be available to us now
from day one was great."