Software-Defined Storage: Driving a New Era of the Cloud
While price isn’t always the most important metric when it comes Flash storage, it’s still a major factor enterprises consider when deciding how much Flash storage to deploy.
Now offering Flash storage in the form of solid-state drives (SSDs), Tegile Systems has unveiled a T3800 Flash array series that effectively pushes the cost per gigabyte for SSDs down to one dollar.
Rob Commins, vice president of marketing for Tegile Systems, says the T3800 is unique in that it leverages IntelliFlash metadata to compress data in a way that increases the total density of the Flash storage environment. This approach significantly reduces the amount of data that needs to be stored by a factor of five, resulting in an actual street price of approximately one dollar per gigabyte, says Commins.
After working with SanDisk to optimize SSD density, Commins says Tegile created the T3800 series, which can access up to 55TB of Flash storage per 1u unit to provide access to up to 10PB of storage per enclosure.
Tegile has also announced a T3400 hybrid storage system that is a hybrid system where half the storage is provided using SSDs, while the other half is provided via magnetic storage.
Like the T3800 series, the T3400 series leverages metadata to compress data and optimize the density of the overall storage environment. The T3400’s base configuration includes 22TB of high-density flash storage and a 2.2TB metadata acceleration engine.
Based on four eight-core Xeon processors, the systems come with support for features such as auto-snapshot, auto-replication, near-instant recovery, on-or offsite failover, and virtualization management at a fraction of the total cost of rival storage platforms, says Commins.
Enterprises have a lot of very sound technical reasons to move primary storage to SSDs these days, not the least of which is a consistent level of I/O performance. But once that decision is made, cost becomes a significant issue—especially when multiple terabytes of SSDs are required. To that end, Tegile Systems provides its Tegile Agility Pricing Program that requires companies to pay only for the amount of data space used, which can be as low as 20.6 cents per GB per month.
At this point, Flash storage is definitely coming to the enterprise in one form or another. The issues now are figuring out how best to go about it, and deciding on a product that fits the budget.
