Tegile Systems storage virtualization and hybrid storage

Tegile Systems' Vice President of Marketing, Rob Commins, stopped by recently to both introduce the company and to fill me in on what the company is doing to make storage more efficient, perform better and cost less.

Our conversation ranged from a discussion of:

• How solid state storage is best applied to solving storage performance problems
• How and where storage virtualization technologies such as auto-tiering, de-duplication and compression should be best applied
• What several of Tegile Systems' competitors are doing to address the very same issues

What is Tegile Systems doing?

Tegile is offering storage arrays and a management dashboard designed to balance performance, capacity, features and price. The company is using a technology it calls Metadata Accelerated Storage System (MASS) to create its Zebi storage arrays.

Metadata, Metadata, where is the metadata?

Most storage systems store the data and the data describing the data (metadata) together on the storage media. As data is added, deleted and moved around, the metadata can get fragmented. This Tegile asserts, can reduce storage efficiency and overall storage performance.

Tegile has developed a way to separate data and its metadata so that data can be accessed more quickly, data can be de-duplicated to reduce storage requirements and data can be compressed to further reduce the storage requirements all without losing storage performance.

If we combine MASS technology with hybrid storage (solid state media combined with rotating media), the result can be vastly improved storage performance, ideal data placement and a significant reduction in size.

Tegile is claiming that it can improve performance up to 7 times more traditional storage solutions while reducing the overall need for storage by 75%.

Snapshot analysis

All aspects of system design are getting close examination as the industry looks for ways to improve overall performance while reducing overall costs. One of the areas getting a great deal of attention is storage. Suppliers of all sizes are doing their best to come up with creative solutions to the cost, the performance, the power consumption and heat production of storage that supports the applications organizations and individuals use daily.

The challenge organizations face is that all of the different, very creative solutions being offered today are confusing. These organizations need to analyze the offerings and uncover the best answers to the following questions:

• Where storage virtualization should be applied to improve their application performance?
• What type of storage media should be selected?
• Where and how should de-duplicaiton and compression be applied?

These organizations often have to select and configure different storage solutions for each of their workloads since one solution will not fit all of their requirements.

Where Tegile appears to have developed a competitive advantage is in the area of self-configuration. The Zebi storage systems learn from actual application use what configuration settings would be the best and applies these settings on the fly.

Organizations using other virtualization technology, such as application or processing virtualization, need to consider how storage virtualization can improve their operations. Tegile Systems would be a good company to meet during this process.