Has anyone used Tegile?

Wilderbeast · 24 Jul 2016 at 15:46

Just about to buy a new SAN and have looked at the usual suspects, but then heard about Tegile and had a deep dive session with them and on the surface it seems to tick all the boxes.

Just wondering if anyone out there has any real world experience with them?

Caged · 24 Jul 2016 at 15:58

What are your boxes that require ticking?

Wilderbeast · 24 Jul 2016 at 16:51

* Must be resilient

* Must be cost-effective

* Must provide enough capacity for at least the next 24 months

* Must be easy and cost effective to expand

* Must provide 10G connectivity to ensure a min 4-year lifespan

* Must provide enough raw performance to last for min 4 years

* Must be easy to manage and maintain

* Must have easy to access metrics and reporting

* Must provide iscsi, smb 3.0 and cifs (although we can migrate cifs to a VM)

Caged · 24 Jul 2016 at 16:55

Can you put any numbers next to those requirements? Cost effective can mean different things to different people, for example. Similarly nobody can guarantee you 4 years of performance without knowing what your workloads will be like in four years.

Sounds like you want a unified storage appliance and hybrid as opposed to all-flash (cost requirements). Tegile are good, but I wouldn't buy one without getting NetApp to quote against them. What are your capacity requirements?

If you're happy to serve files from a VM guest and provide file services through an HA File Server role then you might as well look at Nimble as well.

Wilderbeast · 24 Jul 2016 at 16:59

Yeah, we have a Netapp now, I have costed a new Netapp against the likes of Nimble et al and they are in the same ball park but with much lower performance and much higher skill sets to manage and maintain.

Looking at 40-50k inc, needs to have around 25tb of storage, we are using it for a hyper-v cluster with around 32 servers on it.

Caged · 24 Jul 2016 at 17:05

CDOT 8.3+ / ONTAP 9 are really quite easy to maintain. If I had to criticise the platform I'd say there are too many components that you need to put in place for monitoring the various aspects of the platform and support isn't where it used to be.

I'm surprised that they can't hit that budget and your performance requirements though.

Yamahahahahaha · 24 Jul 2016 at 18:20

No SAN / NAS on the market provides a decent SMB3.0 solution. Tegile and Tintri say they do but both their implementations are incomplete compared to what Windows does. If you're serious about doing SMB3 then either DAS Storage Spaces or iSCSI presentation to Windows header boxes are your only real options.

Tegile are great if you have lots of existing infrastructure that needs to be combined into a single platform (SAS, iSCSI, FC). Otherwise there are better solutions for less money / more speed / more features.

I'm very surprised that nobody can touch NetApp on that pricing. Rolling it back a bit if you're looking for a Hyper-V storage solution I'd look at Pivot3, Nimble, NexSAN, perhaps HPE MSA - any of the Hybrid 'fast and basic' storage vendors who can offer plain iSCSI solutions. There aren't any vendors on the market offering deep integration into Hyper-V in the same way VMWare does. We get this requirement a lot and most people just go with their preferred iSCSI vendor. EMC probably can provide a VNXe solution for that kind of money but their support has been atrocious lately and I don't see it getting better any time soon.

On the bright side your 40 - 50k should cover 10GbE switching and cabling too.

Caged · 24 Jul 2016 at 23:09

I wouldn't have thought Clustered Storage Spaces in its current incarnation would have hit a performance target that NetApp wasn't able to, which leaves the iSCSI (maybe even FC) and HA File Server option.

Yamahahahahaha · 25 Jul 2016 at 22:45

Storage Spaces are ridiculously fast under the right conditions. All of the issues we have around them are the janky ways it's administered and monitored. The process for swapping disks is gross compared to modern arrays. I don't know if this is even fixed in 2016...

Caged · 26 Jul 2016 at 00:01

Interesting. Everything that a Dell VAR were telling me about the product was basically to avoid it for anything other than a file server sort of role because everything is done in software and the disks just passed through, although I guess it depends how many beans you give the servers running it.

The reason I've stayed away from it is because I'm not the person who would have to support it, and the DIY nature of it leaves room for finger pointing. It could be solved instantly if HP bundled all the kit together in one SKU in their Windows NAS range and supported it but I assume nobody wants that responsibility.

I'm keeping an eye on 2016 because of Storage Spaces Direct and the sort of poor-mans Hyperconverged path they are going down.

ecksmen · 26 Jul 2016 at 18:25

Thought about heading over to broadberry and configuring a failover windows 2012 R2 cluster?

£50K will get you a lot of disk, but it would be a tad "homebrew".