Global Financial Services Firm IDS Selects Tegile

Tegile Systems, Inc. announced that International Decision Systems, Inc. (IDS), provider of software and consulting services to more than 250 customers in 34 countries, has implemented its hybrid arrays to improve its data center capabilities.

IDS offices and data centers around the world serve banking and financial services firms, including nearly half of the largest leasing companies in the US. The company’s enterprise HDD arrays were direct-attached, and nearly all servers are virtualized, 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 Corp.‘s 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 IO/s needs. When a Tegile representative said IDS could expect storage capacity savings from 40 to 50% 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% improvement in storage performance, actual results are closer to 75%, he says. IDS stores nearly 18TB on the Tegile system, but data services reduced that footprint to just 4.58TB.

“We are currently seeing 74.43% 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 VMs has also gone from approximately 30mn to about 2 or 3mn. The increase in performance did not require any changes to the existing network, and the performance gains required no reconfiguration. Tegile hardware connects via IDS’ existing mix of 10GbE and 1GbE running 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 specialized training quickly add up and become unsustainable.

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

“Reducing infrastructure costs will make the US data center 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 center 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 US We can build upon this framework for years to come.“

Tegile’s hybrid storage arrays combines DRAM and SSDs with less-expensive HDDs and a set of data management and protection features to deliver both speed and capacity at an affordable price.