Tegile's new faster fatter flash box flings self at big data analytics

Tegile is, or rather was, a hybrid flash/disk array startup alongside Nimble Storage and Tintri. All three have been growing furiously, offering near-flash array speed with disk economics for bulk data. There are four products in Tegile's hybrid array line-up: T3100 with 96GB of controller memory and 26TB–170TB of raw …

[Anonymous Coward]

it's not about the hardware

What I want to know is, what's up with their software? Are these guys hard at work hacking the bejesus out of zfs or what? Does it lose data? Does it fall on its face?

[Rob Commins]

Re: it's not about the hardware

Hi yo_G - This is Rob Commins - the Tegile guy quoted in the article. You are absolutely correct - its the software, stupid! Our branch from ZFS has been performing incredibly well from a performance, functionality and reliability standpoint since we started shipping in 2011. I have been in the storage business since 1986, and have never worked with a company that has such a huge set of elated customers. Some may want to argue about code underneath the hood and whatnot; all I can say is the kit works and our customers on average spend over $2.80 on capacity/performance to existing systems and net new systems within a year for every dollar they spent on their initial deployment because they want to deploy us in a bigger way or deploy us in more parts of their business. They wouldn't be doing this if we lost data or fell on our face.

I hope that helps,

Rob

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: it's not about the hardware

Its really easy to tout performance and reliability, especially when your company habitually buys back equipment from failed deployments / angry customers under the conditions that ex-customers sign NDAs which in-turn prevent them from speaking publicly about their bad experiences.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: it's not about the hardware

For some reason, Rob's post reminds me so much of Comical Ali.

http://i.ytimg.com/vi/yfAeMtcURg0/hqdefault.jpg

[traderenvy]

Re: it's not about the hardware

yo_G,

Is that all you could muster? Throw FUD? Imbecile.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: it's not about the hardware

No, actually, it was a straight up question. Does it actually work in practice? Like it or not, you're conducting an experiment in software engineering. It's in your interest to convince the rest of the world that your experiment is a success. I'm mildly interested in the outcome (professional curiosity, you might say). Your fraction of the storage market is tiny and believe me, I have no reason to want you guys to fail.

[Ammaross Danan]

Re: it's not about the hardware

No, their array does not lose data. It has, for us at least, struggled under a write-heavy ~800 IOPS load with 2 hybrid shelves. Lesson learned: don't buy their lower-end (weak single proc) shelves if you are using dedup+compress with ANY flash in your system.

[PlinkerTind]

Re: it's not about the hardware

If it is ZFS, then avoid dedupe. ZFS dedup is broken and should be avoided. OpenZFS reports problems with ZFS dedupe. But ZFS compression works great. I suggest you turn off dedupe and keep compression, and then you will probably see very good performance.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it will perform well until its half full, which is half good.