Mary Lanning Healthcare Deploys Tegile Array

Tegile Systems, Inc. announced that Mary Lanning Healthcare has selected its Zebi arrays as its EMC CLARiiON replacement.

Mary Lanning Healthcare is the major medical facility serving the residents of central Nebraska. The complex includes a state-of-the-art hospital, a range of medical services and clinics and employs a staff of nearly 1,000. The facility has approximately 12,000 emergency room visits and 5,200 inpatient admissions annually.

It operates a virtualized IT environment, with VMware as the server hypervisor and VMware View powering a VDI rollout. The company’s primary storage is virtualized with DataCore Software Corp.‘s SANsymphony. The primary application is McKesson Corp.‘s Paragon, an hospital information system, including an integrated clinical and financial system, built on the SQL server platform.

The health center had been operating with an EMC CLARiiON CX3 FC array as its main storage system. The addition of SANsymphony virtualization software gave them more functionality and flexibility with its storage but also exposed the limitations of the CLARiiON array, according to Aaron Young, director of IT.

“When we added DataCore, we were able to leverage the CLARiiON space more effectively, but it couldn’t keep up with the traffic, so that’s when we started looking at other solutions.“

Mary Lanning Healthcare was also burdened with ongoing EMC support costs, which Young called ‘horrendous.’ To prevent a re occurrence of budget-busting support expenses, Young and his team prepared a new storage RFP that specified a guaranteed fixed-cost contract that included five years of maintenance and support. Young was initially considering products from HP/3PAR and X-IO when IT Outlet, Inc., a reseller out of South Dakota, told him about Tegile. What really caused Young to focus on Tegile was a sweep of DCIG’s 2014 Hybrid Storage Array Buyer’s Guide. Tegile products took the four top spots ahead of products from EMC, NetApp, Oracle and others.

Tegile was the best value and was able to configure a package with two Zebi arrays, addressing Lanning’s five-year time frame, with enough capacity and performance headroom to give Young a sense of comfort while facing a range of regulatory record keeping requirements.

“It was a challenge when we went live with DataCore getting our EMC to play nicely and work well behind it,” said Young. “The DataCore product is pretty much click, click, click, done and the Tegile product falls right in line with that. The user interface for Tegile is intuitive and awesome and the dashboard is just crisp and everything is where it needs to be. I’ve been very happy with it.“

Mary Lanning purchased a Zebi HA2100 array and J2100 expansion array connected via 8Gb FC. The arrays were a solution for Mary Lanning’s virtual infrastructure with a flash-driven storage architecture designed to make the management of both virtualized servers and VDI easier, faster, more reliable, more scalable and less expensive. Zebi arrays combine Tegile’s patented Metadata Accelerated Storage System technology with performance DRAM, solid state flash, Intel Xeon processors, resulting in higher capacity and higher performance.

While Young was clearly pleased with the capabilities and value of the Tegile technology, he had some reservations about Tegile suggesting 10TB of physical raw storage to hold 18TB of data. Young was dubious that Tegile’s data reduction could work as promised for his data set. The Zebi arrays ran as promised, with a 75% storage footprint reduction on VDI storage and more than a 50% reduction for server virtualization storage.

Mary Lanning has also gained the performance improvements of the Tegile flash-driven storage, hitting 32,000 IO/s compared to a record-best of just 8,000 IO/s for the CLARiiON.

“The best thing about the people we dealt with at Tegile is they came from all these big Fortune 500 companies like Microsoft and VMware, so there is broad expertise they brought to the table,” said Jay Larson, decision support manager.

“It seems like every time I call the support line at Tegile, I get exactly the right person,” said Young. If I’m having a Microsoft issue, I get the person who used to work at Microsoft. He says ‘you need to do this and this’ and I’m done. It’s far and above the best support I’ve had lately. We’re kind of hoping Tegile doesn’t grow.“