Missouri School District Chooses Tegile Hybrid Storage

Tegile Systems, Inc. announced that the Mehlville School District has implemented a hybrid storage solution from its Intelligent Flash Array portfolio to help overcome issues suffered with an aging and nearly out-of-capacity Dell EqualLogic solution.

Located in south St. Louis County, MO, the Mehlville School District consists of one early childhood center, 10 elementary schools, four middle schools, two high schools, along with additional alternative learning programs, to serve the educational needs of about 11,000 children in a growing community of more than 90,000 residents within a 44-square-mile area. After experiencing a crash of its existing Dell EqualLogic storage due to a firmware issue that nearly led to a loss of all of its mission-critical data, the Mehlville School District decided to replace its aging and nearly full system with a new solution. Despite the problems, the school district still asked for a proposal from Dell, Inc., as well as other tier 1 vendors, including EMC Corporation and NetApp, Inc. as well as Nimble Storage, Inc. and Tintri, Inc.

Not seeing much value in the high-cost bids that featured older technology, Mehlville School District expanded its search to include other vendors that could provide the flash-performance needed to improve the user experience in accessing files and supporting applications. As a public institution, cost was an important consideration so a hybrid solution was sought. After looking at a number of solutions, Nimble Storage and Tegile were in the final discussion.

“When it came down to Nimble and Tegile, they both were offering some really good diagnostics that were available over the web,” said Steven Lee, IT director, Mehlville School District. “In the end, when we looked at those two, we liked the technology Tegile was using. It fit our needs the best.“

IT departments for educational institutions must support a wide range of workloads-everything from employee file shares, student information, databases, human resource data and communication videos. With each application and end user competing for storage resources, it can be difficult to deliver consistent performance and maintain 24×7 availability without seeing storage costs spiral out of control. Intelligent Flash Arrays enable the transformation of an institution’s IT infrastructure, delivering lightning-fast performance and high levels of availability at a cost that’s one-third of traditional storage arrays.

“After engaging with tier 1 provider to try to find a replacement for thei failed Dell EqualLogic solution and being underwhelmed by the technology feature set and price point, we were able to step in and help the Mehlville School District find the performance, reliability and ease of management they were looking for,” said Rob Commins, VP marketing, Tegile. “With each application and end user competing for storage resources, it can be difficult to deliver consistent performance and maintain 24×7 availability without seeing storage costs spiral out of control. Tegile arrays enable educational organizations to transform their IT infrastructure, delivering lightning-fast performance and high levels of availability at a cost that’s one-third of traditional storage arrays.“