Grass Valley Opts for Tegile HA2300 Hybrid Array

Tegile Systems, Inc. announced that Grass Valley USA, LLC, a provider of television production and content distribution workflow, has implemented its HA2300 hybrid array to provide the speed, cost and year-to-year investment protection for its VM environment.

Grass Valley deployed a FlexPod architecture that included NetApp storage, the Cisco Unified Computing System and VMware at its Hillsboro, OR engineering center to support its large virtual infrastructure. The FlexPod system was used by Grass Valley for a variety of mission-critical applications including software development, training, customer service, documentation, build operations, VDI and Q&A testing. Performance and latency issues resulting in the growth of VMs on NFS led the company to seek out a new solution to replace its NetApp FAS2240 storage system.

With all of the Hillsboro operations except core IT running in its virtual infrastructure, Grass Valley began an analysis of storage offerings that would satisfy its demanding needs for speed, acquisition price point and long-term investment costs to accommodate year-after-year growth. The company evaluated options that included purchasing a replacement NetApp FAS2240 storage system as well as offerings from EMC, Isilon and Hitachi before deciding to take a ‘leap of faith’ and adopt a Tegile hybrid storage array to meet its business objectives.

“Tegile really does perform like you’ve never seen before,” said Tony Combs, solutions architect, Grass Valley. “They’re more cost effective than anyone in the industry right now. And Tegile does something no one else does. Their dedupe is inline, which is very impressive. It’s almost too good to be true.“

Tegile flash-driven 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, these hybrid arrays allow organizations like Grass Valley to centralize operations, manage more machines without sacrificing capacity, mitigate the disruption of IO/s storms with seven times the performance at considerably lower latency, protect data at a reduced cost compared to other arrays, and eliminate wear-leveling problems and data-integrity issues.

For the cost of the NetApp system, Grass Valley was able to implement a Tegile HA2300 flash-driven array that proved to be 10 times faster than the FAS2240. NFS latencies have been reduced to an ‘amazing’ sub-1 millisecond with an ‘almost obscene’ 40,000 IO/s and 9.5GB/sec throughput to the controller. Performance of the syste handles the 480 VMs, 50 VDIs and 42 SQL databases utilized by the Grass Valley team. Additionally, the system went from running 90% CPU utilization to a 2% CPU load.

“We’re pleased that Grass Valley took that leap of faith and was able to meet their cost and performance requirements with the implementation of a Tegile hybrid storage array,” said Rob Commins, VP marketing, Tegile. “Whether as a replacement for an overloaded storage system or as part of a new storage architecture, Tegile maximizes capacity with on-the-fly de-duplication and data compression to enable more hosted virtual desktops for a lower investment in storage and network infrastructure – all without compromising performance.“