University of Colorado School of Dental Medicine Upgrades Service With Tegile Zebi Hybrid Arrays

Tegile Systems, Inc.
announced that the University
of Colorado School of Dental Medicine (SDM) in Aurora has upgraded to its Zebi hybrid storage arrays after experiencing I/O bottleneck and latency
issues with its existing Dell HDD-based arrays.

SDM in Denver is one of
the six schools that comprise the university’s Anschutz Medical Campus. But the
School of Dental Medicine is unique in that it is the only one of the six
schools that serves actual patients, providing low-cost dental services to
65,000 patients last year at the on-campus dental clinic.

When the clinic opens every day at 9:00AM, front desk employees check in up to
300 patients simultaneously. The SDM was experiencing its own unique type of
boot storm, with inadequate IO/s to handle the load and register that many
patients simultaneously, frustrating the front desk staff with waits
for patient records.

According to Jaymil Patel, director of information services at UC’s SDM: "We are the only building on campus that has
actual patients come in the door. We have hundreds of patients every day so we
have the task of not only being a school, but a business. The pressure on us is
a lot higher. If the other schools have an IT problem, students might not be
able to take a test. But if we have a problem we have actual patients in dental
chairs all day long and we can’t function."

An engineer from Citrix evaluated the school’s infrastructure and confirmed the
IO/s problem with the Dell storage. He recommended that SDM look at hybrid
solid state-HDD drive storage solutions. The SDM team initiated the research
and evaluation process after identifying four important criteria for a new
storage system: high IO/s, low latency, multi-protocol and built-in data
reduction. After evaluating products from Tegile,
Nimble Storage, Inc. and WhipTail Technologies, Inc., the school picked Tegile as
the winner.

"When we compared the price and the
functionality we were looking for, Tegile was the winner because it does
everything we wanted," said Patel. "The hybrid model that Tegile presented was really attractive to us.
Compression and data deduplication were big factors for us and Tegile was the
only one with both to save capacity."

The school installed a Tegile Zebi HA2100EP array and J1100 expansion array
last August and added a J2100 expansion array in January with an additional 26TB of storage capacity.

According to Rob Commins, VP marketing, Tegile: "Our Zebi arrays win ‘hands down’ when users are looking for high IO/s,
low latency, functionality, multi-protocol and built-in data reduction. Fitting
into the university’s budget, while taking the frustration out of the equation
for the staff who were living with intolerable waits for patient records, and
making the patient experience a good one, is exactly what our Zebi hybrid
arrays are designed to do."

According to Patel: "In the past, if
all 300-plus chairs were refreshing the status, everything was so slow, but now
we don’t even realize that this issue exists. It’s just phenomenal for
everybody. You can imagine at 9 o’clock we check in more than 300 patients, so
all of them are refreshed every 30s and we don’t see any latency, no issues,
nothing."

Tegile, which has market share with universities, is helping
colleges and universities protect their strained IT budgets while boosting
their scholarship funds with its new ‘Don’t Overpay for Storage’
promotion. Under the program, Tegile will contribute $2,500 to a college’s
scholarship fund for every Zebi hybrid array purchased through June 30, 2013.