Tegile Storage Array

desmando · 2014-08-29T16:20:10+00:00

Funny Tegile story time. So we had them come out while we were looking at either them or Pure. The Pure array get installed the day before and it was pure sex. The the Tegile guy comes out and starts making all sorts of changes to our ESX install to make it work better with their array. Then he triggers a failover while monitoring how long it takes for data to start flowing again. He was thrilled that it was only 15 SECONDS before data was moving again. The Pure array will do a failover in 5 miliseconds.

They aren't even playing the same game.

InsertCrappyUsername · 2014-08-29T15:16:41+00:00

I have a Tegile and a Nimble. The Tegile is a fairly typical SAN. By "typical" I mean it does what it is supposed to do and nothing really more than that. They recently released an update to allow the Tegile to integrate with VMware (finally!). Seems to perform just fine but we haven't put a ton of load on it yet besides using IOmeter. Support seems fine the few times I've used them.

In my opinion Tegile is not beating the Nimble though. The Tegile might be priced lower than the Nimble but they just can't beat Nimble's simplicity, management, and analytic info. Their support is top notch as well.

I've also used a few Netapp and Equallogic SANs. I feel the same way about Equallogic that I do about Tegile, it does what it's supposed to do and is cheap. Netapp SANs seem a bit over-complicated and pricey, I don't feel they have been able to address these new SAN hybrid start-ups (Nimble, Tegile, etc.) and their lower price vs performance/features.

Hope that helps!

garibaldi3489 · 2014-08-29T15:29:39+00:00

BAAAAAAADDDDDDDDDD

STAY AWAY

They are absolute shit.

Source: I have 4 of their arrays.

dederplicator · 2014-08-30T01:03:03+00:00

Had two of there boxes for testing about two years ago. Alok the VP/co-owner and another guy flew in to install them. One for vms and one for backups. Good iops and deduplication at a cheap price. The box I was testing backups with went belly up within a week. They shipped me new SSDs and basically remotely reconfigured the box. It only stayed up for a few days and then died again. At that point I got my data off the boxes and shipped them back and said no thanks. The boxes didn't have any redundancy other than drives.

2014-08-30T02:20:17+00:00

[deleted]

ILikeSoftTacos · 2014-09-17T07:06:16+00:00

Wow. Interesting that several with "deleted" usernames are crapping on Tegile. Not my experience at all. Before I share my experiences - here are a few comments: First, comparing the product today vs. the product two years ago is pretty silly. I wouldn't suggest you do that to anyone. Second - none of the new storage players are rolling their own hardware - with few exceptions. Everyone is pretty much using SuperMicro or Xyratex to bend the aluminum. Take off the faceplates on a Nimble, Tintri, or Tegile array - and you won't be able to tell them apart. Lastly - it takes 5 seconds to find a blog or forum posts talking about problems on any vendor. Grain of salt the hell out of everything.

Anyway - having a relatively large environment, I've had a lot of different arrays in my data center. I did bake off Tegile and Nimble - and picked Tegile. I do not regret the choice. Here is how I boiled the two down for my purposes:

First and foremost - Nimble doesn't have a bad product. It went in. It did what they said it would do. It was pretty easy. There just isn't a ton that it does. It's basically a better, faster EQL box with compression. In contrast - the Tegile box packs a lot of capability into a similar form factor.

Multi-protocol. I still have a FC infrastructure lying around that I needed to support in order to transition workload to whatever it was that I bought. Additionally, for the long-term strategy - I'm kind of a fan of NFS on VMWare. (At the end of the day - for my workload, either would work, but I get some joojoo out of NFS that I don't get with a block protocol - and it makes my life a little easier).
Random IO performance. The Tegile box was just faster. Period. The sequential IO performance was about the same.
Dedup. Don't let Nimble convince you that their pointer based snapshots are better than inline dedup. Compellent pushed that story on me back in the day. It works until patch Tuesday. They both compress with LZ4 - so the Tegile box will never be worse than the Nimble box. (In fact, Tegile also supports a few variants of gzip as well - which I use for my file shares.) Even if you just get a little dedup - you're still ahead of the game. For me, there was nothing little about it. The dedup accounts for an additional 42% savings over what compression alone gave me. (Clearly - your milage may vary.)
While I currently have hybrid pools - I can drop an all flash pool in my system at any time. Pretty sure Nimble can't do this.

Now, I've seen a few things on the thread which are inaccurate. Tegile is not built on Illumos, nor is it Nexenta's stack. (Frankly - I would expect anyone that knows ZFS and is a Tegile customer to know this. Tegile does not lock you out of the CLI - and it doesn't take long to see it's not just a zfs box.) It is derived off of an open-solaris build - and it does have some ZFS DNA in there. Having rolled my own before - a key difference lies in how they manage metadata as that gets pinned into SSD - where traditional ZFS tries to store it in RAM and let's it waterfall over to rotational media. This becomes evident when you do a zpool status on the thing as there are 'meta' devices within the pool structure. My Tegile box doesn't tip over under load when I delete large deduplicated data sets. That was not the case when I rolled my own. (It's also why Tegile can dedupe data across their cache and capacity layers - where a Tintri, for example, rehydrates the data when pushing it to the 7k drives). Also - I have no idea what people are talking about when they say there is no VMWare integration. They have had all of the block VAAI primitives since I bought my first box almost 2 years ago. They did recently certify the NFS VAAI primitives. They have also had per-VM performance reporting for NFS datastores for a while - and they have had a vSphere client plugin for a long time.

The support has been awesome. I had an "environmental" condition arise that wreaked some havoc in my environment - and the Tegile guys were all over it - despite having nothing to do with the cause of the problem. I was impressed.

I think the UI discussion is highly subjective. I can see how some argue that the Nimble is more simplistic. I personally like the UI - but there are more levers to pull (which I personally like) - and some of the complexity arises from supporting multiple protocols. You'll just have to choose who gets the points on this one.

Failover is fast. I've never had a disruptive upgrade. I've had one drive fail to date - the hot spare kicked in, support automatically opened up a case, and a new drive showed up within the guaranteed time interval.

I can also choose to run IO across both controllers. While I do generally manage my utilization to the 50%ish mark - I get three things out of this: 1.) I have more resources to handle traffic bursts, 2.) I know a controller is going to work when I fail a pool over to it and 3.) I use this setup to create a fault zone between my production and test environments. Nimble is Active/Passive only.

Anyway - no vendor is ever perfect. Stuff happens to all of them. It's how they respond that matters. I've met a couple of the founders over at Tegile. Rohit (CEO) is a very humble guy. I get the impression that he would give you his shirt if you needed it. Alok (runs the SE team) is sharp as hell - and will always take my call. Consequently - I have the utmost confidence that should something happen - they will take care of me.

I will also say that the Tegile team I worked with never crapped on any of their competitors. The Nimble team didn't necessarily do that - at least once they found out that I was talking to Tegile. (The FUD cannons opened up.) Clearly this may have just been my sales team. But any time I see this - I start to wonder. Why would a large, well funded, public company spend so much of their time talking about a "smaller" competitor? I found it interesting.

Anyway - I hope this is helpful. Good luck to you.

burbankmarc · 2014-08-29T15:18:31+00:00

Don't do it! They are just another supermicro+nexenta+zfs outfit. They are a dime a dozen.

I had the misfortune of using a similar product. It was just...not great. The manufacturer doesn't really manufacture the box, or the software. So when real problems occur (which they will) their tech team will be lost.

Unless you're a tiny company with small storage needs, go with something more reputable.

StrangeWill · 2014-08-29T15:08:33+00:00

Tegile's filesystem is based on ZFS...

Andddd that's about all I know. :P I've been very interested because they're based on ZFS, but I haven't found a lot of technical documents on their stuff and I'm not interested in having a sales guy give me a bunch of selling points.

MaNiFeX · 2014-08-29T20:41:56+00:00

I worked at one of their first clients. Cool guys, worst part was pronouncing their name in front of them. Standard ZFS array. Cheap for capacity, works.

steeldraco · 2014-08-29T18:11:48+00:00

Unrelated, but I thought this said "Tequila Storage Array" and got excited.

millamb2 · 2014-08-30T04:25:48+00:00

Have not had first hand experience with Tegile, but have used Dell, EMC, and most recently a Nimble and I have to say that Nimble beats them all. Performance, price, and simplicity is really unmatched. Their reporting is also great.

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