Top dialysis services company taps Tegile

The Zebi array with 9 TB of solid state storage is configured as Network Attached Storage running the NFS protocol as part of a recent server virtualization initiative to migrate its HP servers to Citrix® XenServer® and XenApp®. Renal Ventures discovered that its incumbent HP storage arrays were inadequate for the higher IOPS demands.

Renal Ventures Management, LLC, a leading provider of dialysis services, providing management expertise and patient-focused care operations to a network of clinic partners around the country, considered upgrading to HP solid state storage as well as alternatives from EMC and Network Appliance. But on the recommendation of Citrix, the company evaluation also included hybrid storage arrays from Tegile Systems.

Renal Ventures currently has five virtual machines running under XenServer and the Tegile storage has performed just as promised during the sales process, said Randy Casterlin, Citrix/Windows server engineer at Renal Ventures. “In the evaluation against other storage vendors, there were three main factors that tipped the scales in favor of Tegile: performance, flexibility and – surprisingly for a startup – the reputation of the company.”

Casterlin said that Tegile offered the best value proposition with the required IOPS performance to support the Citrix virtualized environment but without the high price of other products that would cripple efforts to deploy a well-balanced IT environment without glaring bottlenecks. “We really like the performance, but we discovered that a lot of best practices are put by the wayside in favor of budgetary constraints. We didn’t want to have a bottleneck with the storage and Tegile made it very cost-effective for us to get into a very nice high-performance NAS. We found we really didn't have to scrimp like we thought we would and have everything else be fully powered – solid HP servers, plenty of RAM and processor power -- only to be crippled by a storage IOPS bottleneck. We really didn’t want to put ourselves in that position.”

The flexibility and future-proofing built into the Zebi were distinct differentiating advantages, according to Casterlin. The Zebi architecture not only supports multiple storage protocols, but simultaneous connections of Fibre Channel, iSCSI, NFS and CIFS. It supports Gigabit and 10-Gigabit Ethernet and 8-Gb Fibre Channel. Tegile also offers Zebi expansion arrays with 18, 26 or 72 TBs of additional storage, protecting the initial investment in Zebi hardware while sustaining a customer’s growing storage environment.

“We really like the flexibility,” said Casterlin. “Right now we’re using NFS but down the road we may want to use CIFS or iSCSI. Being able to make those decisions quickly and not having to purchase something new or an add-on having it all be available to us now from day one was great.