The extra capacity has allowed us to consolidate most of our storage onto one platform.
IT Manager at a wholesaler/distributor with 501-1,000 employees
The extra capacity has allowed us to consolidate most of our storage onto one platform.
Pros and Cons
- "High performance and ease-of-management are the most valuable features."
- "Snapshots are not as easy to access as on a NetApp device."
How has it helped my organization?
What is most valuable?
High performance and ease-of-management are the most valuable features.
What needs improvement?
It's annoying that if you turn on SMB3 (as opposed to the earlier CIFS protocol), then it is not possible to access a file store using a mixture of SMB and NFS. This is a serious restriction for a multi-protocol file server.
Snapshots are not as easy to access as on a NetApp device.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We have not had issues with stability.
Buyer's Guide
DDN IntelliFlash
December 2024
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How are customer service and support?
Support has been good, although we haven't needed to use it much.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We switched from NetApp, mainly due to cost.
How was the initial setup?
The setup was reasonably straightforward, although the documentation could be improved in terms of the networking.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We evaluated NetApp.
What other advice do I have?
It's a good product with good support. I would recommend it.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Managing Consultant with 51-200 employees
Vendor
May 27, 2015
Its data access is incredibly fast and efficient.
Ah, my first blog after Storage Field Day 6!
It was a fantastic week and I only got to fathom the sensations and effects of the trip after my return from San Jose, California last week. Many thanks to Stephen Foskett (@sfoskett), Tom Hollingsworth (@networkingnerd) and Claire Chaplais (@cchaplais) of Gestalt IT for inviting me over for that wonderful trip 2 weeks’ ago. Tegile was one of the companies I had the privilege to visit and savour.
In a world of utterly confusing messaging about Flash Storage, I was eager to find out what makes Tegile tick at the Storage Field Day session. Yes, I loved Tegile and the campus visit was very nice. I was also very impressed that they have more than 700 customers and over a thousand systems shipped, all within 2 years since they came out of stealth in 2012. However, I was more interested in the essence of Tegile and what makes them stand out.
I have been a long time admirer of ZFS (Zettabyte File System). I have been a practitioner myself and I also studied the file system architecture and data structure some years back, when NetApp and Sun were involved in a lawsuit. A lot of have changed since then and I am very pleased to see Tegile doing great things with ZFS.
Tegile’s architecture is called IntelliFlash. Here’s a look at the overview of the IntelliFlash architecture:
So, what stands out for Tegile? I deduce that there are 3 important technology components that defines Tegile IntelliFlash ™ Operating System.
- MASS (Metadata Accelerator Storage System)
- Media Management
- Inline Compression and Inline Deduplication
What is MASS? Tegile has patented MASS as an architecture that allows optimized data path to the file system metadata.
Often a typical file system metadata are stored together with the data. This results in a less optimized data access because both the data and metadata are given the same priority. However, Tegile’s MASS writes and stores the filesystem metadata in very high speed, low latency DRAM and Flash SSD. The filesystem metadata probably includes some very fine grained and intimate details about the mapping of blocks and pages to the respective capacity Flash SSDs and the mechanical HDDs. (Note: I made an educated guess here and I would be happy if someone corrected me)
Going a bit deeper, the DRAM in the Tegile hybrid storage array is used as a L1 Read Cache, while Flash SSDs are used as a L2 Read and Write Cache. Tegile takes further consideration that the Flash SSDs used for this caching purpose are different from the denser and higher capacity Flash SSDs used for storing data. These Flash SSDs for caching are obviously the faster, lower latency type of eMLCs and in the future, might be replaced by PCIe Flash optimized by NVMe.
This approach gives absolute priority, and near-instant access to the filesystem’s metadata, making the Tegile data access incredibly fast and efficient.
Tegile’s Media Management capabilities excite me. This is because it treats every single Flash SSD in the storage array with very precise organization of 3 types of data patterns.
- Write caching, which is high I/O is focused on a small segment of the drive
- Metadata caching, which has both Read and Write I/O is targeted to a slight larger segment of the drive
- Data is laid out on the rest of the capacity of the drive
Drilling deeper, the write caching (in item 1 above) high I/O writes are targeted at the drive segment’s range which is over-provisioned for greater efficiency and care. At the same time, the garbage collection(GC) of this segment is handled by the respective drive’s controller. This is important because the controller will be performing the GC function without inducing unnecessary latency to the storage array processing cycles, giving further boost to Tegile’s already awesome prowess.
In addition to that, IntelliFlash ™ aligns every block and every page exactly to each segment and each page boundary of the drives. This reduces block and page segmentation, and thereby reduces issues with file locality and free blocks locality. It also automatically adjust its block and page alignments to different drive types and models. Therefore, I believe, it would know how to align itself to a 512-bytes or a 520-bytes sector drives.
The Media Management function also has advanced cell care. The wear-leveling takes on a newer level of advancement where how the efficient organization of blocks and pages to the drives reduces additional and often unnecessary erase and rewrites. Furthermore, the use of Inline Compression and Inline Deduplication also reduces the number of writes to drives media, increasing their longevity.
Compression and deduplication are 2 very important technology features in almost all flash arrays. Likewise, these 2 technologies are crucial in the performance of Tegile storage systems. They are both inline i.e – Inline Compression and Inline Deduplication, and therefore both are boosted by the multi-core CPUs as well as the fast DRAM memory.
I don’t have the secret sauce formula of how Tegile designed their inline compression and deduplication. But there’s a very good article of how Tegile viewed their method of data reduction for compression and deduplication. Check out their blog here.
The metadata of data access of each and every customer is probably feeding into their Intellicare, a cloud-based customer care program. Intellicare is another a strong differentiator in Tegile’s offering.
Oh, did I mentioned they are unified storage as well with both SAN and NAS, including SMB 3.0 support?
I left Tegile that afternoon on November 5th feeling happy. I was pleased to catch up with Narayan Venkat, my old friend from NetApp, who is now their Chief Marketing Officer. I was equally pleased to see Tegile advancing ZFS further than the others I have known. With so much technological advancement and more coming, the world is their oyster.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Buyer's Guide
DDN IntelliFlash
December 2024
Learn what your peers think about DDN IntelliFlash. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: December 2024.
831,265 professionals have used our research since 2012.
System Architect at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
One can learn this data compression tool fairly quickly.
Pros and Cons
- "Data Compression: Up to 80% space reduction in the database"
- "It only keeps one hour of real-time data without the ability to do deep analysis of each element."
Solution Architect at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
We find setup to be straightforward and quick.
Pros and Cons
- "It has reduced our electricity usage by reducing the amount of disks needed for the virtual environment."
- "They need to offer better integration for a virtual platform to enable you to create hyper-converged solution."
Improvements to My Organization
This product is relatively new, no major feature release yet.
Valuable Features
We've been able to realise storage space savings for our virtualization environment. Also, it has reduced our electricity usage by reducing the amount of disks needed for the virtual environment.
Room for Improvement
The monitoring matrix and its dashboard need work. They need to offer better integration for a virtual platform to enable you to create hyper-converged solution. They need to help increase ways to save on hardware and electricity usage.
Stability Issues
There have been no performance issues.
Scalability Issues
We've not had to scale it yet.
Customer Service and Technical Support
It's excellent.
Initial Setup
It's straightforward and quick. The provisioning of a volume can be done within a minutes.
Implementation Team
We implemented it in-house.
ROI
It takes around three and half years to achieve ROI.
Other Solutions Considered
We also looked at HP EVA, IBM v7000, and Compellent 8000.
Other Advice
When installing it, you should utilize two controllers with an additional disk shelf.
Space Savings with VMs and ~10 database servers
Usage during normal day
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: We're distributors.
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Updated: December 2024
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Dear David,
nice report and its real, extra capacity, less management than on NetApp, but not all functions are as easy as on NetApp. If you rfefer to other storage solutions like pure or nimble you will find out really fast, that tegile is more complete than others. Also the license model is easy and clear, you can use what you get without pain of license fees if you scale up or out.
What we need here are more reports about Tegile from real situations and real customers lets work on it
Kind regards Rüdiger