Global financial services firm selects Tegile hybrid storage

IDS offices and data centres around the world serve banking and financial services firms, including nearly half of the largest leasing companies in the United States. The company’s enterprise-class HDD arrays were direct-attached, and nearly all servers are virtualised, yet Craig Debban, global IT director, who was noticing storage-based performance issues that impacted productivity along with dwindling capacity.

Despite multiple frustrating, unsuccessful visits from their EMC engineers and support team, Debban said the disk systems wasted performance and were not configured correctly. Rather than more of the same for only an incremental improvement, IDS evaluated a variety of approaches to meet IOPS needs.

When a Tegile representative said IDS could expect storage capacity savings from 40 to 50 percent based on deduplication and compression features included in the Tegile array, Debban considered this a ‘hyperbolic’ sales pitch. But since installing the Tegile HA2130EP hybrid system and two expansion shelves earlier this year, he says the benefits were hardly hyperbolic. Instead of the estimated 50 percent improvement in storage performance, actual results are closer to 75 percent, he says. IDS stores nearly 18 TB on the Tegile system, but data services reduced that footprint to just 4.58 TB.

“We are currently seeing 74.43 percent savings in our data and I expect that number to go up as we add more servers,” said Debban. “With Tegile, the performance problems are gone. We went from people noticing slowness to it no longer being an issue at all.”

Cloning time on the company’s virtual machines has also gone from approximately 30 minutes to about 2 or 3 minutes. The dramatic increase in performance did not require any changes to the existing network, and the impressive performance gains required no reconfiguration. Tegile hardware connects via IDS’ existing mix of 10GB and 1GB Ethernet running both iSCSI and NFS protocols. Data services include deduplication, compression, thin provisioning, snapshots, remote replication and application profiles.

IDS also valued the ease of use, which translates to fiscal savings too – Tegile arrays require only an IT generalist’s understanding of storage, unlike other vendors that require several days or weeks of training. With a global workforce like IDS, the cost and staff time of specialised training quickly add up and become unsustainable.

Prior to the move to Tegile, IDS had planned to build a data centre in India, but because of the infrastructure savings realised, the company is reconsidering this investment. Instead, they believe it will be just as cost-effective to build in the U.S., with the added advantage that the corporate IT team can have greater control over data security.

“Reducing infrastructure costs will make the U.S. data centre cost-competitive with the facility in India,” said Debban. “This was an unanticipated benefit that not only can improve the performance and security of the data centre infrastructure, but also makes maintenance and support easier. It also provides sales with a competitive advantage by ensuring clients that their data never leaves the shores of the U.S. We can build upon this framework for years to come.”

Tegile’s advanced hybrid storage arrays combines high-performance DRAM and Flash SSD with less-expensive hard disk and a comprehensive set of data management and protection features to deliver both speed and capacity at an affordable price. Tegile’s arrays balance high performance, high capacity, features and price making them the ideal solution for a wide range of industries and applications.