Yakima Herald-Republic Chooses Tegile Zebi Array

Tegile Systems, Inc. announced that The Yakima Herald-Republic has chosen its Zebi array to address VM performance issues during peak usage hours.

The Yakima Herald-Republic covers local and state news that is relevant to Central Washington, including the city of Yakima and the Yakima Valley, as well as national and world news. Part of The Seattle Times company, the daily newspaper consolidated its computing infrastructure with two sister publications, including a desktop virtualization deployment, to reduce costs and administrative overhead while improving the reliability and security of its business-critical computing operations.

The newspaper’s virtual environment was running on a NetApp FAS3240 storage appliance and during peak traffic, its 300 users across the organization’s three properties would experience major slowdowns when attempting to access or use resources within and outside the virtual environment. Backups and snapshots during normal hours would cause the virtual environment to slow to the point where users’ virtual desktops stored on the NetApp appliance would become unresponsive, resulting in complaints from its very demanding user base.

With the Yakima Herald-Republic’s current NetApp configuration approaching its peak maximum performance, the company evaluated several solutions before determining the Tegile offering presented the most effective price point for the required feature set while improving the performance of its virtual environment.

“After implementing the Zebi array, the performance of our virtual environment improved immensely,” said Geoff Silva, operations and technology director, The Yakima Herald-Republic. “We also noticed an immediate drastic savings in space due to the inline deduplication feature. It’s hard to quantify these savings because our NetApp was disorganized and had data stored across many volumes, but it was nowhere near the 72% deduplication and compression savings we have seen after moving all VDIs to the Zebi array.“

Zebi arrays are designed to make the management of VDI easier, faster, more reliable, more scalable and less expensive. Whether used in conjunction with VMware View, Microsoft Terminal Services, Citrix Xen or other solutions, they allow organizations like Yakima Herald-Republic to centralize operations, manage more machines without sacrificing capacity, mitigate the disruption of IO/s storms with seven times the performance at lower latency, protect data at a reduced cost compared to other arrays, and eliminate wear-leveling problems and data-integrity issues. Using a ‘best practices approach,’ a Tegile professional services engineer optimized the existing VDI environment to one that would allow the Zebi array to perform optimally.

“We looked into many solutions from different vendors but they couldn’t compete with the included feature set and price point offered by Tegile,” said Silva. “Since implementing the Zebi array, we have not received tickets filed with our help desk regarding slow or unresponsive VMs. This lack of frustration from our users has helped improve the image of our busy IT department.“