My favorite part of the article is this piece about how hybrids are getting strong traction in the commercial sector: “Unlike hyperscale, hybrid storage is gaining serious traction beyond the realm of cloud service providers and technology-driven enterprises such as Facebook and Google. Wikibon co-founder and CTO David Floyer pinpointed the reason behind the technology’s momentum in a March article entitled “Hybrid Storage Poised to Disrupt Traditional Disk Arrays.”

This partnership will further extend our value to customers – large and small.  We appreciate the coverage, Maria, and are eager to do more great things with our friends at Voonami.

• VDI environments must be sized to accommodate user-visible I/O peaks that often affect many virtual desktops at the same time. Server workloads also peak, but not generally all at the same time. In the VDI world, the peaks generally occur during boot up and login times during which they are referred to as “boot storms” and “login storms”, respectively. However, I/O contention can also occur when many users perform I/O intensive actions all at once.
• Deduplication takes on new meaning. Server workloads are often very different from one another, but with virtual desktops, organizations often deploy identical desktop images. This creates new opportunity for advanced storage features, such as deduplication, to have more of an impact than ever before. These advanced features must be considered during planning.

There are untold stories regarding companies that have ventured into the VDI waters only to be scared away by the unforeseen sharks. You, however, now have an exact, shark-free map to the Treasure Island that is VDI! Tegile has partnered with Cisco and VMware to create a brand new reference architecture for building a 1,000 seat VDI environment using hardware and software provided by Tegile, Cisco, and VMware. With this exacting blueprint, you can learn how to deploy an identical environment using one of Tegile’s entry level and most inexpensive arrays to support a whopping 1,000 users.

This reference architecture document describes the architecture of the Cisco® Desktop Virtualization solution with shared storage for 1,000 virtual desktops based on VMware View 5.1 and VMware vSphere 5. The Cisco Desktop Virtualization solution includes:

• Cisco UCS® B-Series Blade Servers
• Cisco Nexus® Switching 5500 Series platform
• Tegile Zebi HA2100 storage array

This reference architecture is based on Cisco’s “scalable architecture” deployment model for desktop virtualization. In comprehensive tests while developing the reference document, Cisco, VMware, and Tegile engineers estimated that ongoing user sessions each require 7 to 10 IOPS each but that, as mentioned earlier, IOPS can peak at certain times. Engineers saw IOPS peak at around the 20,000 IOPS mark, which is well below the Tegile Zebi HA2100’s 30,000 IOPS capacity. In other words, the HA2100 can run 1,000 desktops with overhead to spare!

Test engineers used Zebi’s NFS connectivity capability as the transport mechanism of choice, although Zebi also supports both Fiber Channel and iSCSI. Zebi provided engineers with two 10 Gb Ethernet adapters on each storage controller, which are themselves configured in an Active/Active scenario. For all tests, engineers enabled Zebi’s in-line de-duplication and compression functionality to best match real-world needs.

The end result, shown in the Figure above, requires a total of eight UCS blade servers – seven servers each run 150 virtual desktop images while the eight hosts the VMware View components necessary for the environment to operate.

During testing, Zebi’s hybrid nature played extremely well. The tests resulted in a 90% cache hit rate, w which is all stored on Zebi’s solid state disks, making that access lighting fast. In almost every application test, Zebi returned response time figured below 0.05 seconds.

At Tegile, we were very pleased to see the validated results of this collaboration, proving, once again, that Tegile’s Zebi line of hybrid storage arrays are a perfect fit, no matter the workload!

New Cloud-based replication service is first of its kind between Hybrid SSD Vendor and MSP

Salt Lake City, Utah and Newark, Calif. – May 14, 2013 – Voonami, a provider of a broad portfolio of offerings for outsourced data centers services (www.voonami.com), and Tegile Systems (www.tegile.com), a leading provider of hybrid storage arrays for virtualized server and desktop environments, today announced a partnership on a new managed replication service that provides Tegile customers with an unmatched value proposition to securely protect their data at Voonami’s world-class data centers with onsite-level application performance of replicated data.

The Voonami managed replication service leverages the remote replication functionality built into every Tegile Zebi hybrid array. Tegile users do not need to purchase any replication or backup software, but simply order the service from Voonami and immediately gain the benefits of distributed data protection to a secure Voonami data center without any additional hardware or software expenditure.

“The combination of Tegile’s disruptive technology and the world class data center resources of Voonami now make it possible to eliminate the cost and complexity barriers to outsourcing data protection projects to the cloud,” said Rob Commins, vice president of marketing, Tegile Systems. “Everything is built in so our customers simply replicate their data over the cloud to a shared resource at Voonami. We’re excited to add another extremely compelling resource to the Zebi package.”

Voonami president Ben Bush said that the out-of-the-box replication functionality highlights the unsurpassed customer value of Zebi arrays, enabling out of the box replication for a variety of use cases.  “Our distributed replication service can be a pure offsite backup play or a disaster recovery play.  People now have the ability to spin up virtual machines on replicated storage with the same performance as their primary storage.” 

The new remote replication service expands the relationship between Voonami and Tegile. Voonami previously installed Zebi 2100 arrays in its two data centers to accelerate the performance of its cloud computing and Storage as a Service product offerings. 

The Voonami-Tegile replication service is the first of its kind for a hybrid SSD array vendor with a Managed Service Provider and signals the strength that Tegile has established with service provider customers, who are adopting Tegile’s Zebi hybrid arrays for the transformational economics that make SSD performance affordable for outsourcing services.

Zebi hybrid arrays are 5-12 times less expensive than all-flash arrays on a cost-per-gigabyte basis, but the breakthrough architecture delivers SSD-level  performance for every application even if the data resides on hard disk storage. Additionally, with integrated in-line data deduplication and compression, Tegile arrays cost about $1 per gigabyte, competitive with traditional enterprise disk arrays but with vastly lower operational costs for power and cooling.  Tegile’s package of high IOPS performance and aggressive cost control is unmatched by pure SSD or conventional hard disk arrays.

About Voonami
Voonami, delivers Data Center solutions, Cloud Computing Infrastructure services, Managed Hosting, Dedicated Servers, VOIP solutions and traditional Co-location services to the business community. For more information please contact us at info@voonami.com, 801-995-4000 or visit http://www.voonami.com.

About Tegile Systems

Tegile Systems is pioneering a new generation of enterprise storage arrays that balance performance, capacity, features and price for virtualization, file services and database applications. With Tegile’s Zebi line of hybrid storage arrays, the company is redefining the traditional approach to storage by providing a family of arrays that is significantly faster than all hard disk-based arrays and significantly less expensive than all solid-state disk-based arrays.

Tegile’s patent-pending MASS technology accelerates the Zebi’s performance and enables on-the-fly de-duplication and compression of data so each Zebi has a usable capacity far greater than its raw capacity. Tegile’s award-winning technology solutions enable customers to better address the requirements of server virtualization, virtual desktop integration and database integration than other offerings. Featuring both NAS and SAN connectivity, Tegile arrays are easy-to-use, fully redundant, and highly scalable. They come complete with built-in auto-snapshot, auto-replication, near-instant recovery, onsite or offsite failover, and virtualization management features. Additional information is available at www.tegile.com. Follow Tegile on Twitter @tegile.

Contacts:

Media Contact
Dan Miller, JPR Communications
818-884-8282, ext. 13
danm@jprcom.com

Download a PDF version of this release here

Company: Tegile Systems

Location: Bangalore, India

Job Description: Tegile is looking for a Senior QA Engineer having 7-10 years relevant experience in testing MS Exchange Server. The candidate should be an:

• Expert in one or more versions of Exchange Server – 2007, 2010 & 2013.

+ Should have expertise in one or more Cluster configurations like CCR, DAG & SCR.
• Knowledge of one or more Volume Managers and file systems is preferred.
• Should have knowledge of best practices and performance tuning.
• Prior experience in Exchange upgrade and migration.
• Expert in trouble shooting performance and configuration issues.
• Hands on experience on VDS/VSS, snapshots and backup and recovery technologies.
• Previous experience handling customer escalations and reproducing customer issues in-house.

Nice to have:

• Perl/Scripting expertise.
• Knowledge of SMB/CIFS & MS Cluster Server.

- Hands on experience in storage provisioning (iSCSI & FC).


Non-technical Skills:

• Should be a self starter.
• Should be able to adapt to a fast paced startup environment.

Note: Candidates who are currently working as Exchange Administrators and willing to change to a QA/Engineering role are welcome.

Additional information:

• This is a full-time, salaried position with benefits.
• See if someone you know works here!
• If you don’t find a common connection, reach out to our fabulous recruiter.

Job Description: Tegile is looking for a Senior QA Engineer having 7 – 10 years relevant experience in testing SMB/CIFS and AD Server. The candidate will be an:

• Expert in multiple versions of SMB (2.x, 3.0) and AD Server (2008 R2, 2012).
• Hands-on experience in multiple versions of Samba.
• Hands-on experience configuring complex AD setups with multiple domains, trees and forest.
• Sound knowledge of trusts. delegations and RBAC.
• Setup of DNS, DHCP services.
• Prior experience in integrating AD for Exchange & VDI.
• Excellent trouble shooting skills for configuration and performance issues.
• Prior experience in handling customer escalations and reproducing customer issues in-house.

Preferred Skills:

• Knowledge of Hyper-V cluster and MS Cluster Server
• Knowledge of Exchange and/or SQL server
• Unix integration

Non-technical Skills:

• Should be a self starter.
• Should be able to adapt to a fast paced startup environment.

Additional information:

• This is a full-time, salaried position with benefits.
• See if someone you know works here!
• If you don’t find a common connection, reach out to our fabulous recruiter.

Company: Tegile Systems

Location: Bangalore, India

Job Description: Tegile is looking for a Senior QA Engineer having testing 7-10 years relevant experience in testing SAN Storage. The candidate is an:

• Expert in two or more of FC, iSCSI, SAS & SCSI protocols.
• Should have experience in translating RFCs, Feature/Functional specifications to good test cases.
• Good understanding of different RAID levels and applying them to improve performance.
• Excellent trouble shooting skills.
• Considerable White box testing background – use FC analyzers such as Finisar for analyzing traces.
• Knowledge of one or more IO multipathing implementations.
• Expertise in Snapshots, Replication, backup and restore technologies.
• Previous experience handling customer escalations and reproducing customer issues in-house

Nice to have:

• Perl/Scripting expertise.
• Good knowledge of one or more Virtualization technologies – VMWare/Xen/Hyper-V
• Basic administration knowledge of one or more OS – Windows/Linux/Unix

Non-technical Skills:

• Should be a self starter.
• Should be able to adapt to a fast paced startup environment.

Additional information:

• This is a full-time, salaried position with benefits.
• See if someone you know works here!
• If you don’t find a common connection, reach out to our fabulous recruiter.

Company: Tegile Systems

Location: Bangalore, India

Job Description: Tegile is looking for a engineer with storage testing having 3-4 years relevant experience. The candidate should have:

• Have experience testing SAN or NAS storage.
• Good understanding and hands on experience in configuring FC/iSCSI or NFS/CIFS/SMB.
• Good scripting and Perl experience. Exposure to maintaining and improving Test suites is an added advantage
• Should have prior experience in creating test cases and scenarios based on Functional/Feature specifications.
• Worked on upgrade, UI (Web/CLI)  and regression testing of storage products.
• Exposure to load generation tools like IO meter/JetStress/Filebench etc.

Optional Skills:

• Good knowledge of Windows/Unix/Linux OS.
• Knowledge of one or more applications – Exchange, SQL Server, Oracle, SharePoint etc.
• Knowledge of one or more virtualization technologies – VMWare/Hyper-V/Xen Server
• TCL/Tk

Non-technical Skills:

• Should be a quick learner.
• Should be able to adapt to a fast paced startup environment.
• Should be flexible to work on other technologies as required.

Additional information:

• This is a full-time, salaried position with benefits.
• See if someone you know works here!
• If you don’t find a common connection, reach out to our fabulous recruiter.

Company: Tegile Systems

Location: Bangalore, India

Job Description: Tegile is looking for a Senior QA Engineer having 7-10 years experience in testing NAS. The candidate should be an:

• Expert in NFSv3, NFSv4.x
• Should have experience in translating RFCs, Feature/Functional specifications to good test cases.
• Good understanding of RPC/Portmapper, NDMP and transport protocols.
• Good understanding of Locking, ACLs and Security (GSSAPI/Kerberos)  features.
• Ability to find performance issues using standard tools and perform RCA.
• Considerable White box testing background – use Network analyzers for tracing and RCA .
• Expertise in Snapshots, Replication, backup and recovery technologies.
• Previous experience handling customer escalations and reproducing customer issues in-house.

Nice to have:

• Perl/Scripting expertise.
• Knowledge of SMB/CIFS.


Non-technical Skills:

• Should be a self starter.
• Should be able to adapt to a fast paced startup environment.

Additional information:

• This is a full-time, salaried position with benefits.
• See if someone you know works here!
• If you don’t find a common connection, reach out to our fabulous recruiter.

Company: Tegile Systems

Location: Bangalore, India

Job Description: Tegile is looking for a Senior QA Engineer having 7-10 years relevant experience in Test Automation. The candidate should have:

• Experience creating Test Harness/Suites for new product.
• Understanding Functional/Feature specification and translating them into Test Plan, test cases and automating them.
• Should have expertise in 2 or more languages – Perl, Java, Python, TCL/Tk or C.
• Good knowledge of shell scripting and expect.
• Hands-on experience in creating libraries, framework, APIs and report generation tools.
• Automating Install, upgrade, load testing and code coverage for complex enterprise software.
• Excellent debugging skills

Preferred Skills:

• Knowledge of build infrastructure and package versioning.
• Experience writing test suites for distributed systems.

Additional information:

• This is a full-time, salaried position with benefits.
• See if someone you know works here!
• If you don’t find a common connection, reach out to our fabulous recruiter.

One of my favorite lines from the article is “The only technical way EMC, NetApp, Dell, HDS, HP and IBM can compete with these three startup hybrid array vendors is by re-writing their incumbent array software; a massive task that will take years to accomplish.”

Yes, we are one of these upstarts that are feasting on the big boys’ lunch.  And, no, we won’t apologize for it.  Consider this …

• Our last 20 wins have come at the expense of competitors such as NetApp and Nimble Storage
• Approximately 20 percent of our business comes from NTAP tech refresh displacements.  Replacements for Dell and EMC are close behind.
• We enjoyed a 280 percent year-over-year growth for the 12-month period of March 2012 to March 2013
• We had a 475 percent quarter-over-quarter growth for Q1 this year compared to last
• Every two quarters, Tegile doubles its revenue
• Our average systems price is under $80,000
• Our industry firsts include being the only multi-protocol hybrid array; first with application-optimized templates to accelerate and simplify the provisioning process; and first to go directly to the cloud with built-in automatic data protection

Our company’s success is measured in the success of our new generation of affordable, feature-rich storage arrays that are up to 7X faster and require as much as 75 percent less capacity than standard disk arrays.  Companies who evaluate us against the “big boys” discover that Zebi arrays can help them reduce their costs and increase the performance of demanding VDI, server virtualization and file share applications.

But what truly differentiates us over any other traditional, all-Flash or hybrid vendor is our use of de-duplication in conjunction with compression to optimize the storage architecture.  Along with using SSDs to support our Metadata Accelerated Storage System (MASS), Zebi integrates DRAM and Flash intelligently into the data path to create an optimized hybrid storage appliance.  DRAM is used as an extremely fast level-1 read cache while Flash SSDs are used as a second level of non-volatile read and write cache.

In spotlighting Tegile in a follow up article yesterday, Chris Mellor wrote, “Our thesis is that small and medium businesses and their channel suppliers like the hybrid arrays because they offer near-flash array performance at equal, or less, than disk drive array prices. What’s not to like about that? The hybrid guys’ businesses have more than 1,500 customers now and (El Reg estimates) something like 3,000 deployed systems. Expect to see entry-level and mid-range systems sales from the HINHED^* gang come under pressure.”

We humbly agree with Chris Mellor’s view of the market space.