Tegile Systems is
pioneering a new generation of enterprise storage arrays that balance
performance, capacity, features and price for virtualization, file services and
database applications. Tegile's Zebi line of hybrid storage arrays is
significantly faster than all hard disk-based arrays and significantly less
expensive than all solid-state disk-based arrays. Featuring both NAS and SAN
connectivity, they are easy-to-use, fully redundant, and highly scalable.
Additionally, they come complete with built-in auto-snapshot, auto-replication,
near-instant recovery, on- or offsite failover, and virtualization management
features. Tegile's patent-pending MASS technology accelerates the Zebi's
performance and enables on-the-fly de-duplication and compression of data so
each Zebi has a usable
capacity far greater than its raw capacity. Additional information is
available at www.tegile.com. |
see also:-
Tegile
- editor mentions on StorageSearch.com and
Tegile's SSD blog
after AFAs -
what's the next box?
animal
brands and metaphors in the SSD market |
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Tegile was ranked
#25 in the
Q4 2016 edition of
the
Top SSD Companies List
which is researched and published by StorageSearch.com.
Tegile
entered the Top SSD Companies List in
Q4 2013.
Tegile's
highest position was #8. In both
Q3 2014 and
Q2 2015
In
Q3 2015 Tegile launched a new storage box called IntelliFlash HD based on
SanDisk's InfiniFlash
SSD hardware box and Tegile's software which can provide 0.5 petabytes of
uncompressed flash capacity in 3U.
Back in
March 2015,
commenting on the launch of InfiniFlash I said - "The availability of
cheap, raw, white box rackmount SSDs like this from SanDisk, HGST and other
vendors may put some pressure on traditional storage vendors to justify why they
charge so much for - what in most cases - are in reality vanilla flash arrays
with some added software features."
In the same news story - I
also named Tegile as a vendor which (while having creatively priced
functionality) would need to react to the cost assumptions set by the
InfiniFlash platform.
Which is what they did.
See also:-
the
whys, wherefores and roadmap to enterprise SSD consolidation
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Editor's earlier comments:- February 3, 2014
- Tegile was ranked
#19 (up 7 places) in the
Q4 2013 edition of
the
Top SSD Companies List
which is researched and published by StorageSearch.com
Tegile Systems is the
highest ranked vendor in this edition of the Top SSD Companies List whose
primary business is
hybrid SSD arrays -
rather than SSD drives or SSD systems. Although - as Rob Commins, VP Marketing,
Tegile reminded people in his (later - April 4, 2014) blog -
Winning in Flash –
But Not Forcing it - "Tegile is a player in the all-flash
business too."
In Q4 2013 Tegile continued to feed the
newswires with stories about "awards" from various publications
including:-
The
hybrid SSD storage pool
market / SSD ASAP market - which began with the first auto caching
appliance shipments in
September 2009
- remains a business opportunity which is still largely under exploited.
One
of the reasons for this is the bewildering number and nature of different types
of solutions being thrown at users - mostly as opportunistic line extensions by
vendors whose core products are really (at heart) something else.
In
such a market - a focused and integrated vendor like Tegile - for whom this is
their main product - has all the marketing communications advantages of a
single superhero technology narrative. (And it doesn't hurt that this superhero
is presented as helping underdogs get results which they know they can't
otherwise afford - and also without having to place their trust in the
theoretically predicted
performance outcomes of a multi-vendor integration casino.) |
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Who's who in SSD? - by
Zsolt Kerekes,
editor - August 2013
Tegile is 1 of more than 200 vendors in
the rackmount SSD
market, and is also 1 of more than 50 vendors in the
SSD ASAP (auto tiering /
caching) market. They also compete in these storage segments:-
iSCSI SSDs and
FC SAN SSDs.
Tegile
claims that its unified hybrid storage arrays optimize the balance between
capacity, performance and costs by combining SSDs (from
HGST) with high
capacity
SAS hard drives with
integrated dedupe and compression. The company claims particularly good
advantages in desktop VDI environments - where they say the dedupe data
reduction can be as effective as 100 to 1 - although the overall range
for all data compression is a saving typically in the 20% to 75% range.
Tegile's system also includes internal snapshot and external data replication
to ensure that data is protected.
The company says - "We don't
simply use SSDs as a tier of storage in our arrays, Tegile has architected the
performance benefits of SSDs throughout the data path, giving every application
a performance boost."
The base product building blocks are 2U and
3U controller or expansion arrays which provide average raw capacity (per U)
around 10TB (HDD), 3TB (flash) and 16GB (RAM).
The company says its
market focus is squarely in the medium enterprise, for whom a highly
functional, efficient and affordable system is often a better fit than pure SSD. |
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In February
2012 -
Tegile announced general
availability of its Zebi hybrid storage arrays - which are rackmount
SSD ASAPs with
internal hard drives and integrated
dedupe,
compression and snapshot.
In August 2013 -
Tegile Systems announced
the closing of its $35 million Round C funding led by late-stage venture firm
Meritech Capital Partners with
additional investment by original stakeholder
August Capital and strategic partners
WD and
SanDisk.
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| Tegile says its sales
exceed its VC funding |
Editor:- August 13, 2013 - Tegile Systems (which
operates in the SSD ASAP
market) today
announced
the closing of its $35 million Round C funding led by late-stage venture firm
Meritech Capital Partners with
additional investment by original stakeholder
August Capital and strategic partners
WD and
SanDisk.
Editor's comments:- Tegile says that unlike some other
VC funded companies
in this market space which have lived mostly on investments Tegile has
generated more customer revenue than it has taken in outside financing. | | |
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| I was even more impressed
by a new (to me) business model which Tegile has been testing on selected
customers. I can see now why the early investors liked this company even though
it took me longer to get it... |
| an SSD
conversation with Tegile (June 24, 2014) | | |
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| making history at the US
Presidential Debate |
Editor:- October 22, 2012 - supporting the US
Presidential Debate taking place today at Lynn University is a high
availability
hybrid
storage array from Tegile
Systems.
Having won the universitys request for proposal
process earlier this year we are diligently working to assemble the technology
that will bring the debate to millions of people and households, said Rob Commins, VP of
marketing, Tegile Systems. We are honored to be a part of American history in
this important way. | | |
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| Tegile's SSD ASAPs taught
this school a lesson |
Editor:- June 12, 2013 - Tegile Systems today
published
a story about how the kids in a Colorado school still managed to learn
stuff when their big bad old HP
SAN array failed to take the VDI strain which had been anticipated from a
pilot. Whoops - who did the modelling? Anyway Tegile saved the day with some
SSDs and one of their hybrid arrays....read
the story
Editor's comments:- when you see the word "school"
in an SSD story - it signals the message "these customers didn't have much
money but they could still afford to buy our stuff." - It's a segmentation
/ value loaded marketing
keyword messaging filtering thing. Other examples like this are:-
- when Google buys some SSDs - you know these Google people are so clever -
and buy so much. They must have got it cheap....
- when a medium sized enterprise which you have never heard of before -
which makes steel parts for tractors features in a story about buying an SSD
solution...
- when a financial markets data services provider (they have nice offices)
features in an SSD story...
I'll leave you to supply those missing
dot-dot-dots yourself. Everyone has different ways of relating to these kinds
of stories (tuning in or filtering out). | | |
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Were the once reasonable
assumptions behind Tegile's utility pricing business model broken and shattered
by the SSD price hikes in 2017?
That would mean repeat customers would
see big bumps where before those were hidden by financial wizardry.
I've
written my speculative thoughts about why Western Digital had to acquire
Tegile. |
| Western Digital
buys Tegile (August 2017) | | |
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| Micron enters rackmount
SSD market |
| SSD news (May 2017) | | |
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| Tegile gets another $33
million funding |
| Editor:- April 11, 2017 - Tegile today
announced
$33 million in additional funding which was led by Western Digital and
current investors. With this financing, Tegile has raised a total of $178
million to date. | | |
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| 51% of
Tegile's AFA customers expect ROI in 1 year |
 Editor:-
June 25, 2015 - A
recently
published survey conducted among customers of Tegile reveals some
interesting insights into the demographics of Tegile's business but also - just
as interesting - provides a spectrum of weighted answers about why people bought
enterprise flash arrays and the perceived benefits.
Among the many
results - the most interesting for me were:-
- "36% plan to use their Tegile storage to accelerate the
development of new products and services. Customers can create read/write clones
of production databases. This enables them to get new applications into
production faster without consuming a lot of storage space."
Editor's
comments:- that's a classic enterprise SSD advantage related to a pain point
which I was discussing with users over 10 years ago.
Users who
don't have the performance freedom which SSDs deliver - but who struggle even
to keep their legacy platforms running sluggishly - know there must be better
things they can do with their raw business intelligence - but are too scared to
interact with the production data. And designing new systems based on sampling -
doesn't give the full picture.
- Tegile says "51% of customers expect to see an ROI in 12
months or less."
Editor's comments:- that's confirmation of
something I said in my article -
year of the enterprise
SSD goldrush?
"what's driving this confidence is that their
customers have done the pilots- they've done the product tweaks - the biggest
customers have finished their cautious rollouts - and they're coming back asking
for more than more. The user mood is changing from - can I afford to use SSDs?
- to a realization that - I can't afford not to use SSDs." (October 2011)
What
Tegile's survey confirms is that the same advantages which were first
experienced by early adopters do indeed trickle down and deliver similar
impacts to mainstream users (if the products are
priced in
a way which is attractive enough to tempt new customers to experiment. The
survey findings which I've commented on above - probably apply to any
leading AFA vendor and not just Tegile.
Here are some interesting
results which are specific to Tegile's business.
- Re the importance of offering "unified" connectivity (FC+IP) - "over
half (53%) were using more than one storage protocol with their Tegile
arrays."
Editor's comments:- that's a higher proportion than I had
assumed. Which also is consistent with the broad spectrum of traditional storage
suppliers that Tegile has been displacing (another aspect shown in the survey).
- Re customer satisfaction? - 92% of responders said that they'd
recommend Tegile.
Editor's comments:- that's a good story for a company
whose business model has been so reliant on
external funding to
sustain its growth.
But how sticky is brand loyalty in the enterprise
flash market? Especially when we're entering a period where I predict that over
90%
of enterprise SSD brands will disappear?
Let's just say that high
customer satisfaction is an excellent achievement but that a customer who has
switched once because they saw a good reason to do so - is a customer who could
easily switch again. While Tegile has some sticky service and software
solutions in its product delivery - don't be beguiled by statements like the
above - if and when you consider the IPO.
And - on the
perils
of extrapolating inferences from surveys - 96 users - the customers who
took part in the survey - aren't the whole market. ...read
the article - Why do people use Tegile Flash Storage? | | |
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| Tegile gets another $70
million funding |
Editor:- May 27, 2015 - Tegile today
announced
it has closed a $70 million Series D funding round bringing the companys
total capital raised to $117 million.
Since shipping its first
hybrid storage array in
2012
Tegile says it has deployed more than 1,500 systems. | | |
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those who tweet loudest |
 Editor:-
February 18, 2015 - Re the visibility seeking marketing activities of
enterprise storage companies - I found much to agree with in a recent blog -
Hybrid
Storage Array Industry Social Landscape - by Don Jennings,
Senior VP - Lois Paul & Partners
(a storage industry proven
PR).
Among
other things Don says "not many of the storage companies in our analysis
have clear content strategies to provide information and value to their
followers. This is especially true on YouTube, where these companies are rarely
posting anything other than product-usage videos. We also dont see any of them
engaging with industry media and influencers..."
The essential
output from Don's article is that he ranks 5 companies in the
hybrid storage array
market - based on the noise level and following they have achieved on
social media.
The companies (in alphabetic order) are:-
.
Setting aside for the moment any reservations you might have about the validity
of using social media as a significant enough comparative measure for
enterprise companies - Don comes up with some interesting statistics for each
company about the level of its followers, tweets etc.
And by that
measure Nimble comes out top of his list. ...read
the article
Editor's comments:- As with any measurement
- you have to ask questions like
- why has this method been chosen? Is it simply convenience?
- And how valid does such a ranking carry over into other interpretations?
etc - such as future business outcomes.
In this case - the agenda is
clear enough - Don's company LPP is in the media business - and some companies
are clearly more noisy (and better understood) than others in "editorial
like" contexts.
If your company isn't doing well enough in the
social media blare - then maybe you should change your agency.
A
devil's advocate counter argument to that might be to say that a single well
designed ad can take a company positioning message to more targeted people than
all the people who see a vendor's tweets and blogs in a year. And every day I
see companies in this industry who lack the confidence to invest in themselves
in an advertising context - preferring instead to cast their fortunes on the
winds of the media lottery newswires.
And another counter argument is
that not all important relationships and engagements are as visible as you
might think on social media. Why should they be - if there are pre-existing or
better ways in which the parties in the same mutual interest segment can
communicate?
For example - I've been talking to Don Jennings regularly
about his storage industry customers since June 2003 - but (at the time of
writing this) we aren't 1st level contacts on linkedin.
And a lot of
the people I talk to about weighty matters in the SSD market would be horrified
by the idea of others knowing what they're thinking about. I'm not saying
that one private communication is worth ten tweets - but if it's about about a
new business plan - or the order from your biggest customer - it can be worth
much more.
On the other hand. Social media may be the only independent
(non financial and non technical) way you can rank some of the companies
you're interested in. As only 1 of the 5 companies above - for example - has got
high enough in the search noise level to appear in the
Top SSD Companies.
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