Tegile Emerges With Hybrid SSD Arrays

Startup Tegile Systems emerged from stealth mode Tuesday with a portfolio of hybrid Solid-State Drive (SSD) arrays that use DRAM, hard drives and two types of flash. The company said its line of Zebi hybrid storage arrays can accelerate applications up to 5 times and reduce storage capacity requirements up to 75 percent.

Hybrid SSD

The difference between Zebi and other arrays is that it can de-duplicate cache and compress data on-the-fly. This makes it suitable for high performance primary applications as well as secondary backup storage. A single Zebi supports both SAN and NAS environments and comes complete with snapshot and replication features for $1 per gigabyte.

"We selected Tegile over other storage vendors because of the Zebi’s unique ability to reduce our storage footprint so dramatically while delivering excellent performance," said Andrew Rawnsley, Chief Technology Officer at Investor Analytics. "With Tegile, we can leverage our storage investment more aggressively than with any other storage vendor."

Newark Calif.-based Tegile said that patent-pending technology underpins its delivery of advanced, cost-effective storage.  The Zebi array uniquely combines a Redirect on Write (ROW) file system with proprietary Metadata Accelerated Storage System (MASS) technology to realize high performance, high capacity and high reliability at low cost. Tegile’s MASS manages the system’s metadata (data about the data) on high speed media to accelerate all storage functions including random and sequential I/O, data de-duplication, compression, snapshots, and RAID rebuilds.

"The increasing demands on storage due to virtualization are pressurizing mid-sized IT organizations where operational cost and efficiencies are particularly top of mind," said Amita Potnis, Senior Research Analyst with Worldwide Storage Systems at IDC. "To address these issues, Tegile has brought to market a storage appliance called Zebi with an extensive feature set, as well as adding primary data de-duplication. Tegile claims Zebi will maintain high performance while being cost effective and highly available."

Zebi storage arrays are immediately available from Tegile Systems, with prices starting at $16,000.

In the following YouTube video Tegile Vice President of Marketing Ron Commins introduces the new generation of storage arrays that balance performance and capacity for virtualization, file services and database applications.