Tegile 'laps' competition

Tegile Systems says that the Mehlville School District has implemented a hybrid storage solution from its Intelligent Flash Array portfolio to help overcome issues suffered as a result of an aging and nearly out-of-capacity Dell EqualLogic solution.

Located in south St. Louis County, Missouri, the Mehlville School District consists of one early childhood centre, 10 elementary schools, four middle schools, two high schools, along with additional alternative learning programs, to serve the educational needs of 11,000 children in a growing community of more than 90,000 residents. After experiencing a crash with its existing Dell EqualLogic storage due to a firmware issue that nearly led to a loss of all mission-critical data, the Mehlville School District decided it was time to replace its aging and nearly full system with a new solution. Despite the problems, the school district still asked for a proposal from Dell, as well as other Tier-1 vendors, including EMC and NetApp as well as Nimble and Tintri.

Not seeing much value in the high-cost bids that featured older technology, Mehlville School District expanded its search to include other vendors that could provide the flash-performance needed to improve the user experience in accessing files and supporting applications. As a public institution, cost was an important consideration so a hybrid solution was sought. After looking at a number of solutions, Nimble Storage and Tegile were in the final discussion.

“When it came down to Nimble and Tegile, they both were offering some really good diagnostics that were available over the web,” said Steven Lee, IT Director of Mehlville School District. “In the end, when we looked at those two, we liked the technology Tegile was using. It fit our needs the best.”

IT departments for educational institutions must support a wide range of workloads—everything from employee file shares, student information databases, human resource data and communication videos. With each application and end user competing for storage resources, it can be difficult to deliver consistent performance and maintain 24×7 availability without seeing storage costs spiral out of control.

“After engaging with Tier 1 providers to try to find a replacement for their failed Dell EqualLogic solution and being underwhelmed by the technology feature set and price point, we were able to step in and help the Mehlville School District find the performance, reliability and ease of management they were looking for,” said Rob Commins, vice president of marketing at Tegile. “With each application and end user competing for storage resources, it can be challenging to deliver reliable performance whilst maintaining constant availability without seeing storage prices escalate. Tegile arrays enable educational organisations to transform their IT infrastructure, delivering lightning-fast performance and high levels of availability at a cost that’s one-third of traditional storage arrays.”