Hedrick Gardner Kincheloe & Garofalo Installed Two Tegile Zebi Arrays

Tegile Systems, Inc.
announced that Charlotte, NC-based Hedrick Gardner Kincheloe & Garofalo
LLP, one of the region’s premier law firms, has installed two Zebi hybrid
arrays to meet its expanding capacity and virtualization needs.

As Hedrick Gardner increasingly moved to a virtual infrastructure, it reached
the capacity limits with its existing HP iSCSI SAN arrays, encompassing 4TB of
capacity across two arrays in a RAID-10 configuration, requiring 50% capacity
overhead for the RAID redundancy on expensive Tier 1 storage. HP storage
offered no option to increase capacity via data compression or deduplication.

With an eye toward further virtualizing Hedrick Gardner’s IT operations with
virtualized desktops, Jeremy DeHart, IT manager, embarked on a project to
evaluate solid state storage systems from NetApp as well as hybrid
SAN arrays from Tintri, Nimble Storage and the Zebi arrays from Tegile.
The Tintri was eliminated from consideration as it only supported the NFS
protocol, didn’t provide any remote replication and was too expensive, while
Nimble was pure iSCSI with no support for NFS or CIFS file storage protocols.
NetApp met all of DeHart’s requirements for protocol support but the licensing
complexity issues made it cost prohibitive.

Ultimately, DeHart decided on the Zebi HA2100 array from Tegile, a
solution that includes compression, deduplication and remote replication
as
standard features along with the most unified storage protocol support –
including FC SANs – of any hybrid storage array.

"With Tegile, I saw it as sort of a
Swiss Army knife for the technology," said DeHart. "The technology portfolio that the Tegile
devices have was paramount to our decision in this process. Tegile’s approach
to the technology is ‘here’s the device and you can pretty much do anything you
want."

Hedrick Gardner has installed two Zebi HA2100 arrays. The main array in
Charlotte is replicated to an identical array for DR protection at the Raleigh
office.

DeHart said that the built-in replication was another factor that weighed in the decision to go with Tegile: "That was a huge consideration in the purchase decision because Tegile
was able to come in at the dollar mark we needed with a replication technology that
was bundled into the price."

A soon as the Tegile storage was installed, it proved to be the right
choice, according to DeHart.

"We
immediately saw improved response times and we were able to consolidate all of
our data on the Zebi appliance, instead of having to cross multiple appliances
as we were doing in the previous environment," he said. "

"The backup capability with the
snapshotting has affected our entire backup strategy," he said. "We have leveraged the CIFS protocol
filesystem revisioning capabilities to provide a near realtime recovery process
for the users."

Despite the superior performance, comprehensive product offering and
cost advantages, Hedrick Gardner still had a concern about trusting its
production storage environment to relatively new hybrid technology before
committing to purchase the Zebi arrays. DeHart’s boss at Hedrick Gardner got on
the phone to speak directly with Tegile CEO Rohit Kshetrapal. That conversation
about Kshetrapal’s vision for Tegile and the company’s fanatical commitment to
customer support convinced Hedrick Gardner and sealed the deal for Tegile.