ITA Group Installing Two Tegile Hybrid Arrays Rather Than Nimble or Tintri

ITA Group, in events, incentives and recognition programs, has deployed two Tegile Systems, Inc.‘s hybrid arrays for the same cost of a capacity expansion of its existing EMC VNX 5500.

ITA Group works with Fortune 500 and 1000 companies to advance employee and channel engagement. Based in West Des Moines, IA, the company employs more than 500 people in regional offices across the country. Faced with a ‘truly expensive’ capacity upgrade needed for its EMC storage, ITA Group reached out to several hybrid vendors, bringing Tegile, Nimble Storage, Inc. and Tintri, Inc. in for what was described as an ‘in-house bake off.’ After moving parts of its workloads over to all of the arrays for IO/s testing, the company chose Tegile for its inline deduplication and compression abilities.

“The biggest thing we saw was Tegile’s data reduction,” said Todd Volz, network engineer, ITA Group. “The cost savings from that were close to the price of upgrading the EMC VNX 5500. Tegile allowed us to come in under budget compared to the storage upgrade, which our managers really liked.“

ITA Group reduced their disk space by 60% by leveraging Tegile’s inline data deduplication and compression. With nearly 500 VMs and another 200 planned for the near future, ITA Group needed a solution that could minimize the impact of duplicate OS data from their highly virtualized VMware environment.

Tegile hybrid arrays leverage the performance of flash, the density of HDDs and the features of IntelliFlash OS, to deliver a storage platform that accelerates a variety of workloads in the enterprise. Duplicate data from OS images, applications, libraries, and user-specific applications that are spread across virtual desktops are identified and reduced by inline deduplication and compression capabilities of Tegile arrays. Organizations can achieve greater than 10-to-1 reduction in storage footprint when deploying a large number of virtual desktops – all this without compromising performance.

“Despite all of the pronouncements about the cost of storage capacity continuing to drop, organizations like ITA Group are still feeling the pinch as the volume of data under storage continues to rise beyond what they have budgeted, especially in virtualized environments,” said Rob Commins, VP marketing, Tegile. “Storage incumbents like EMC believe that they have users locked into their existing solutions and feel that they can charge exorbitant prices to expand their undersized devices. We’re pleased to offer an alternative to this approach by enabling companies to not only reduce the data they have under management but oftentimes improve the performance of their systems at a price less than simply expanding capacity.“