Colorado School District 27J Selects 2 Tegile Hybrid Arrays

Tegile Systems, Inc. announced that School District 27J in Brighton, Co. has
implemented two Zebi hybrid storage arrays as part of its VDI, serving as a
replacement for a failed HP Enterprise Virtual Array that could not handle the
load placed upon it when the district’s teachers began to log into the system
on the first day of school.

School District 27J provides educational services to around 16,000 students,
ensuring that they have the knowledge, skills and attitudes needed for present
and future competence and success. As
part of this commitment, the district sought to create an online computing
environment leveraging VDI that would provide teachers with 24/7 access to
district resources to allow them to support their students both inside and
outside the classroom. After a year of
planning, the district launched its VDI environment with a 100-desktop pilot
program scaling to 800. As the system
went live the first day of the school year, the resulting boot storm from teachers
logging into the system crashed the backend of the infrastructure.

With the HP SAN being deemed undersized and unable to perform as expected, the
district began to look at other storage options that could quickly
overcome the hardware failure they had experienced. One option was to try for more IOPS by
inserting a tray of SSD into the EVA but that was going to take HP 30 days to
deliver and the district needed help sooner than later. The district also looked at products from
Dell and Nexsan before taking a ‘leap of faith’ and trusting a
solution from Tegile to overcome the issues it was facing.

"We had all these teachers who
needed to do their jobs and we were basically dying," said Jeremy
Heide, CIO of School District 27J. "Tegile
came out and looked at what we had, assessed our needs in the timeframe we had
and implemented a solution in the middle of an outage. They worked with the VMware engineer that was
helping us to design a storage system that would address our unique challenges
and were able to deliver the Zebi solution within a week of us placing the
order."

Zebi arrays leverage the performance of SSD and low cost per terabyte of high
capacity disk drives to deliver up to seven times the performance and up to 75%
less capacity required than legacy arrays. They combine Tegile’s
patented MASS technology with DRAM, solid state flash, Xeon processors and high speed Ethernet or FC, resulting in higher
capacity and performance. Maximizing capacity, on-the-fly de-duplication
and data compression enable more hosted virtual desktops for a lower investment
in storage and network infrastructure.

School District 27J currently is utilizing two Zebi units for two pools to
support 866 virtual desktops. Desktop
delivery times that were initially measured in hours on the HP system now only
take 14 seconds with Tegile. With its
built-in compression and deduplication features, the school district was able
to reduce the 25TB of storage written to their Zebi array by 90% to 2.5TB. And the units’ performance
enhancements have convinced staff that they can accelerate
their 3-year plan for offering VDI from teachers to libraries to students.

"Tegile data storage and management
solutions address the needs of today’s education IT infrastructure,"
said Rob Commins, VP marketing, Tegile.
"While ours may be a
different approach to the traditional storage architecture that many
organizations are accustomed to, those, like Brighton School District 27J, that
trust in us to provide them with the optimization they need to meet their needs
will be justly rewarded. New generation Tegile Zebi hybrid storage arrays are
designed to make the management of VDI easier, faster, more reliable, more
scalable and less expensive to better deliver what students need while helping
educational entities overcome the financial challenges they face in today’s
world of budget constraints."