10 April 2017

Tegile Systems says its arrays have enabled the college to consolidate its data volumes and free-up half its existing storage capacity.

Bolton College has replaced its Dell storage arrays with a single, multi-tiered, flash system from Tegile Systems.

Prior to the deployment, the college used eight Dell EqualLogic arrays and periodically added more as required.

This approach was inefficient as the data were spread across multiple SANs, making their management unnecessarily time-consuming, and leading to higher power consumption as well as greater floor space requirements.

By the time the Dell system reached end of life, it was holding around 43TB of unstructured raw data. It was replaced bt Tegile’s T3630 platform.

Thanks to the data deduplication and inline compression technologies of its flash-driven hybrid arrays, the company says the college has realised a 57 per cent reduction in its storage requirements, from 43TB down to 19TB.

This saving includes a drop from 4TB to below 1TB of primary storage that is needed to support the college’s virtual desktop infrastructure.

Bolton Colleges’ senior infrastructure engineer Irfan Patail believes the new solution will be scalable over a five-year project period to meet future demands.

“Our VMware VDI environment is currently running 450 VMs. With Tegile’s flash array we could easily double that figure without any impact on user experience and storage performance whatsoever, both in terms of IOPS and latency.

“We are so confident in our Tegile system that, in addition to migrating all of our VMs from the old storage, we have also migrated footage from our 170 onsite CCTV cameras to the array’s spinning disks which would have led to serious IOPS and latency issues with our old Dell storage arrays.”

Tegile adds that its array is vendor agnostic and integrated “seamlessly” with the college’s new Fujitsu servers and VMware hypervisors.