DDN IntelliFlash Reviews

I have to admit that, almost 3 years ago, when I met Tegile for the first time I was all but impressed. At that time they had presented themselves as another company with a ZFS-based appliance… and my first thought was “you won’t be going anywhere!”. I was very wrong indeed (perhaps it was just a bad presentation) and since then they have been coming up with good things from both the product side and the ability to execute points of view.

ZFS-ish core

Tegile is ZFS but not “everything-ZFS”. First of all they made it clear from day-1, they are not playing in the open source field and they want to maintain maximum control on the roadmap, quality and enhancements they make.
Consequently, the development team have maintained most of the FS unchanged but they have also improved all the awkward parts like, for example, the deduplication engine. This has produced a powerful, feature rich, hybrid or All-Flash, 2-controller series of appliances which are capable of scaling from just a few disks up to more than 1PB of capacity in different configurations.

It is clear that SMB is the sweet spot for them. In fact, they are not good at serving very high end workloads (in the range of hundreds of thousands of IOPS all under 1mS) or very huge capacities (like for the write-once-read-never kind of archiving applications)… but they are good for 90-95% of SMB enterprise workloads… and they can also be a good option for larger enterprises in branch offices as well as secondary storage in many cases.

The product (and the company) you are actually buying

From the end user perspective (we are talking about SMB here) ZFS is not the core part. Important things come from other aspects of a storage systems: ease of use, features and capabilities come first but this type of customer also spends a lot of time looking at what other companies like them are doing (something like, if it works for them, it should work for us too!)…

From the features and capabilities POV the product is impressive: a good and easy to use management interface, all the features you can expect from a modern storage system, remote replication, many different supported protocols, strong integration with the most common hypervisors including server off-loading capabilities (again, not only VAAI but also ODX for Microsoft environments), VM-level granularity for most features and much more. They’re jumping on the Cloud-based management/analytics band wagon too. It’s also good to see Tegile embracing partnerships with companies like Oracle (it means a lot for a small organization that buys a single array to serve all its workloads, not only VMware!).
Are they perfect? No, of course. Could they be more efficient? Yes. (for example, some polemics started during the SFD6 session about how they manage compression+deduplication process) But, again, they are good enough (or better) in most cases.

If you look at the second aspect, I mean SMB users looking at each other, you can easily find Tegile’s growth very comparable to what we saw a few years back from other successful companies like Compellent and, lately, Nimble. They are very good at communicating what they are doing (I receive tons -too many- of PRs from them talking about wins, news, features and so on)… and I think they want to make sure they are well recognized by potential customers through other similar end users (as I said, SMBs look at other SMBs…)

They’re not very well known yet in Europe, but they are quickly expanding operations here too (for example, I know of one system sold here in Italy too). If I were a reseller or an end user I’d give them a look.

Closing the circle

Long story short, Tegile has leveraged the best of ZFS (an already mature, 10+ year_ old, FS which is a great backend for their system) to build a very interesting appliance full of features. From this point of view they have been very clever… after just two years in the wild, they have a mature product which is already at par (or better) with many competitors.

Tegile is still a small company but I like the way they do things and their pragmatism. They do not have scale-out, very high-end or fancy-shmancy storage… but they do what an SMB organization needs and I think they do it well. Don’t they?

First published here. 

Ah, my first blog after Storage Field Day 6!

It was a fantastic week and I only got to fathom the sensations and effects of the trip after my return from San Jose, California last week. Many thanks to Stephen Foskett (@sfoskett), Tom Hollingsworth (@networkingnerd) and Claire Chaplais (@cchaplais) of Gestalt IT for inviting me over for that wonderful trip 2 weeks’ ago. Tegile was one of the companies I had the privilege to visit and savour.

In a world of utterly confusing messaging about Flash Storage, I was eager to find out what makes Tegile tick at the Storage Field Day session. Yes, I loved Tegile and the campus visit was very nice. I was also very impressed that they have more than 700 customers and over a thousand systems shipped, all within 2 years since they came out of stealth in 2012. However, I was more interested in the essence of Tegile and what makes them stand out.

I have been a long time admirer of ZFS (Zettabyte File System). I have been a practitioner myself and I also studied the file system architecture and data structure some years back, when NetApp and Sun were involved in a lawsuit. A lot of have changed since then and I am very pleased to see Tegile doing great things with ZFS.

Tegile’s architecture is called IntelliFlash. Here’s a look at the overview of the IntelliFlash architecture:

So, what stands out for Tegile? I deduce that there are 3 important technology components that defines Tegile IntelliFlash ™ Operating System.

• MASS (Metadata Accelerator Storage System)
• Media Management
• Inline Compression and Inline Deduplication

What is MASS? Tegile has patented MASS as an architecture that allows optimized data path to the file system metadata.

Often a typical file system metadata are stored together with the data. This results in a less optimized data access because both the data and metadata are given the same priority. However, Tegile’s MASS writes and stores the filesystem metadata in very high speed, low latency DRAM and Flash SSD. The filesystem metadata probably includes some very fine grained and intimate details about the mapping of blocks and pages to the respective capacity Flash SSDs and the mechanical HDDs. (Note: I made an educated guess here and I would be happy if someone corrected me)

Going a bit deeper, the DRAM in the Tegile hybrid storage array is used as a L1 Read Cache, while Flash SSDs are used as a L2 Read and Write Cache. Tegile takes further consideration that the Flash SSDs used for this caching purpose are different from the denser and higher capacity Flash SSDs used for storing data. These Flash SSDs for caching are obviously the faster, lower latency type of eMLCs and in the future, might be replaced by PCIe Flash optimized by NVMe.

This approach gives absolute priority, and near-instant access to the filesystem’s metadata, making the Tegile data access incredibly fast and efficient.

Tegile’s Media Management capabilities excite me. This is because it treats every single Flash SSD in the storage array with very precise organization of 3 types of data patterns.

1. Write caching, which is high I/O is focused on a small segment of the drive
2. Metadata caching, which has both Read and Write I/O is targeted to a slight larger segment of the drive
3. Data is laid out on the rest of the capacity of the drive

Drilling deeper, the write caching (in item 1 above) high I/O writes are targeted at the drive segment’s range which is over-provisioned for greater efficiency and care. At the same time, the garbage collection(GC) of this segment is handled by the respective drive’s controller. This is important because the controller will be performing the GC function without inducing unnecessary latency to the storage array processing cycles, giving further boost to Tegile’s already awesome prowess.

In addition to that, IntelliFlash ™ aligns every block and every page exactly to each segment and each page boundary of the drives. This reduces block and page segmentation, and thereby reduces issues with file locality and free blocks locality. It also automatically adjust its block and page alignments to different drive types and models. Therefore, I believe, it would know how to align itself to a 512-bytes or a 520-bytes sector drives.

The Media Management function also has advanced cell care. The wear-leveling takes on a newer level of advancement where how the efficient organization of blocks and pages to the drives reduces additional and often unnecessary erase and rewrites. Furthermore, the use of Inline Compression and Inline Deduplication also reduces the number of writes to drives media, increasing their longevity.

Compression and deduplication are 2 very important technology features in almost all flash arrays. Likewise, these 2 technologies are crucial in the performance of Tegile storage systems. They are both inline i.e – Inline Compression and Inline Deduplication, and therefore both are boosted by the multi-core CPUs as well as the fast DRAM memory.

I don’t have the secret sauce formula of how Tegile designed their inline compression and deduplication. But there’s a very good article of how Tegile viewed their method of data reduction for compression and deduplication. Check out their blog here.

The metadata of data access of each and every customer is probably feeding into their Intellicare, a cloud-based customer care program. Intellicare is another a strong differentiator in Tegile’s offering.

Oh, did I mentioned they are unified storage as well with both SAN and NAS, including SMB 3.0 support?

I left Tegile that afternoon on November 5th feeling happy. I was pleased to catch up with Narayan Venkat, my old friend from NetApp, who is now their Chief Marketing Officer. I was equally pleased to see Tegile advancing ZFS further than the others I have known. With so much technological advancement and more coming, the world is their oyster.

What is most valuable?

What needs improvement?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and technical support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

What other advice do I have?

Improvements to My Organization

Valuable Features

Room for Improvement

Stability Issues

Scalability Issues

Customer Service and Technical Support

Initial Setup

Implementation Team

ROI

Other Solutions Considered

Other Advice

When installing it, you should utilize two controllers with an additional disk shelf.

Space Savings with VMs and ~10 database servers

Usage during normal day