The company says that performance, density and memory upgrades will make things like facial recognition of individual customers in retail stores a reality.
Newark CA-based Tegile systems has announced its new T4000 series of both all-flash and hybrid arrays. It is a replacement for the T3000 series, and features significantly greater density and processing power.
“This is one element of a technology refresh on our entire product line,” said Rob Commins, Tegile’s VP of Marketing. “We are increasing the density of our systems by 33 per cent. We are also increasing the performance – almost doubling the amount of IOPS. We are also more than doubling the amount of persistent memory.”
Commins said that Tegile’s architecture is a differentiation for it over its many competitors in the space.
“Within the flash market today, two things are happening,” he said. “Fast flash is getting faster and dense flash is getting more dense over time. The result is almost a bifurcation within the flash market, but we have an architecture that can take advantage of both. Customers can truly migrate to an all flash data centre with very compelling economics.”
The architectural refresh that upgrades the T3000 series to the T4000 has several components.
“First, the whole backend connection to the storage goes from 6 GB to 12 GB SAS to give it a lot more bandwidth,” Commins said. “This also puts it in a position for dual-ported NVME drives, which aren’t yet available in volume but should be in the first quarter of 2017.”
The T4000 series has multiple classes of persistent memory. This is not a new feature for Tegile, but these arrays have been significantly upgraded in this respect, and have 2.3 x the memory of the T3000 series.
“This will take latencies down massively in a shared storage environment,” Commins said. “It will open up entirely new markets. For example, retail stores will be able to do real time facial recognition in the store, to target specific customers with personalized marketing. You haven’t been able to do that with existing technology.”
All the tech upgrades will touch every product in the entire line.
“We have 13 different configurations in this product line, and they all have the exact same architecture and software,” Commins said. “The difference is just the blends of storage media in them. They all have the same data management tools.”
This commonality has always been part of Tegile’s appeal to the channel.
“For the channel, it’s just one product line to learn and handle,” Commins said. “They can knock out any type of application with one easy to use platform.”
Commins said this will be the first time that customers who have purchased Tegile IntelliCare Lifetime Storage, which they introduced a year ago, will be able to apply here, in the refresh of the T3000 family.
“With our Lifetime Storage, we forecast what we think storage costs will be in three years’ time, generally 40-60 per cent of today, and we amortize it into the maintenance agreement. At the end of that time, they get a tech refresh without a big capital refresh cost. It lets them do refreshes without having to ever go back to the well. The channel likes it as well, because it increases the stickiness with the customer.”
The T4000 Series is broadly available now.
