Zebi Storage Arrays help Colorado School District

School District 27J provides educational services to around 16,000 students, ensuring that they have the knowledge, skills and attitudes needed for present and future competence and success. As part of this commitment, the district sought to create an online computing environment leveraging VDI that would provide teachers with 24/7 access to district resources to allow them to fully support their students both inside and outside the classroom. After a year of planning, the district launched its VDI environment with a 100-desktop pilot program scaling to 800. As the system went live the first day of the school year, the resulting boot storm from teachers logging into the system crashed the backend of the infrastructure.

With the HP SAN being deemed undersized and unable to perform as expected, the district began to look at other storage options that could quickly overcome the hardware failure they had experienced. One option was to try for more IOPS by inserting a tray of solid-state drives into the EVA but that was going to take HP 30 days to deliver and the district needed help sooner than later. The district also looked at products from Dell and Nexsan before taking a “leap of faith” and trusting a solution from Tegile to overcome the issues it was facing.

“We had all these teachers who needed to do their jobs and we were basically dying,” said Jeremy Heide, CIO of School District 27J. “Tegile came out and looked at what we had, assessed our needs in the timeframe we had and implemented a solution in the middle of an outage. They worked with the VMware engineer that was helping us to design a storage system that would address our unique challenges and were able to deliver the Zebi solution within a week of us placing the order.”

Tegile Zebi arrays leverage the performance of SSD and low cost per TB of high capacity disk drives to deliver up to seven times the performance and up to 75 percent less capacity required than legacy arrays. Zebi hybrid arrays combine Tegile’s patented MASS technology with high performance DRAM, solid state flash, Intel Xeon processors and high speed Ethernet or Fibre Channel, resulting in higher capacity and significantly higher performance. Maximizing capacity, on-the-fly de-duplication and data compression enable more hosted virtual desktops for a lower investment in storage and network infrastructure.

School District 27J currently is utilizing two Zebi units for two pools to support 866 virtual desktops. Desktop delivery times that were initially measured in hours on the HP system now only take 14 seconds with Tegile. With its built-in compression and deduplication features, the school district was able to reduce the 25 TB of storage written to their Zebi array by 90% to only 2.5 TB. And the units’ performance enhancements have convinced staff that they can successfully accelerate their 3-year plan for offering VDI from teachers to libraries to students.

“Tegile data storage and management solutions address the needs of today’s education IT infrastructure,” said Rob Commins, vice president of marketing, Tegile Systems. “While ours may be a different approach to the traditional storage architecture that many organizations are accustomed to, those, like Brighton School District 27J, that trust in us to provide them with the optimization they need to meet their needs will be justly rewarded. New generation Tegile Zebi hybrid storage arrays are designed to make the management of VDI easier, faster, more reliable, more scalable and less expensive to better deliver what students need while helping educational entities overcome the financial challenges they face in today’s world of budget constraints.”