Disclaimer: I recently attended Storage Field Day 6.  My flights, accommodation and other expenses were paid for by Tech Field Day and their sponsors. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

For each of the presentations I attended at SFD6, there are a few things I want to include in the post. Firstly, you can see video footage of the Tegile presentation here. You can also download my raw notes from the presentation here. Finally, here’s a link to the Tegile website that covers some of what they presented.

Before the session we took a quick tour of the lab. Here’s a blurry phone snap of shiny, shiny machines.

Tegile spent a fair bit of time taking us through their system architecture which I found interesting as I wasn’t overly familiar with their story. You can read about their system hardware in my presentation notes. I thought for this post I’d highlight some of the features in the data services layer.

Data Reduction is offered via:

• In-line deduplication
  • block level
  • dedupe across media
  • performance multiplier
• In-line compression
  • block level
  • turn on/off at LUN / share level
  • alogrithm – LZ4, LZJB, GZIP
  • perf multiplier
• Thin provisioning
  • array-level thin
  • for LUNs and shares
  • supports VMware VAAI “STUN”
  • JIT storage provisioning

Interestingly, Tegile chooses to compress then dedupe, which seems at odds with a few other offerings out there.

From a data protection perspective, Tegile offers:

• Instantaneous thin snapshots
  • point-in-time copies of data
  • space allocated only for changed blocks
  • no reserve space for snapshots
  • unlimited number of snapshots
  • VM-consistent and application-consistent
• Instantaneous thin clones
  • mountable copies
  • R/W-able copies
  • point-in-time copies
  • Space allocated only for deltas
• Detect and correct silent corruption
  • checksums all data blocks
  • data and checksum in separate locations
  • match data/checksum for integrity
  • corrupt / mismatched data fixed using blocks from mirrored copy

From a data recovery perspective, the Tegile solution offers:

• Instantaneous stable Recovery
  • data-consistent VM snapshots
  • hypervisor integrated
  • MSFT VSS co-ordinated data-consistent snapshots
  • VM-consistent and application-consistent snapshots
• Intelligent data reconstruction
  • no need to rebuild entire drive
  • only portion of data rebuilt
  • accelerated metadata accelerates rebuilds
• WAN-optimized replication
  • snapshot-based site-to-site replication
  • no need to replicate multiple updates to a block within the replication interval
  • minimizes bandwidth usage
  • one to many / many to one replication

Overall, I found Tegile’s presentation pretty interesting, and will be looking for opportunities to examine their products in more depth in the future. I also recommend checking out Scott D. Lowe’s article that looks into the overall theme of simplicity presented by a number of the vendors at SFD6.