Tegile becomes the second vendor to announce an all-flash version around the generation of NVMe drives that is about to ship, with massive performance and latency improvements over existing product.

Two months ago. Newark CA-based Tegile Systems announced the latest version of their flagship IntelliFlash HD flash storage platform, with the big news being the addition of the capability to utilize Non-Volatile Memory Express [NVMe]. Today they are doubling down on NVME, with the announcement of their new IntelliFlash N-Series arrays, a pure all-NVME configuration.

“NVMe is designed for performance,” said Rob Commins, Tegile’s VP of Marketing. “The NVMe pipe lets us go faster, and because it is denser, you can consolidate more on the same box and get better returns on investment. It will also let customers run ‘third platform’ applications, around real-time retail and the Internet of Things.”

The all-NVMe N-series is a dual-controller system with 24 NVMe SSDs in a 2U footprint, that can deliver 3,000,000 IOPS with consistent 200 microsecond latency. Commins said that these numbers will translate into meaningful benefits for customers who need the performance.

“Today we have customers in health care, who, when they moved from traditional storage to our flash T-Series, were able to accelerate their administration software and facilitate 62,000 more patients a year, just by moving to flash,” he said. “Being able to do this 10 times faster with the N-Series would have significant revenue implications for them.”

Financial services companies will see the same type of return.

“A financial services customer that took 22 hours to process data on VNX cut that down to 4 hours on our T series,” Commins said. “NVMe will get that down to 20 minutes. That type of customer won’t use that saving to cut costs, but to rerun more analytics, which will let them come up with smarter information.”

The new Tegile N-Series comes in two different models, the N5200 and the N5800. Both have 24 drives. However, the 5200 has 448 GB DDR4 and 16 GB NVDIMM per system, while the N5800 has 3 TB DDR4 and 32 GB NVDIMM per system. The N5200 has a SAS3 backplane, while the N5800 moves up to a PCIe. The N5200 has 23 – 46 RAW TB of storage while the N5800 has 76-153 RAW TB. Finally, while the N5200 has 1 DWPD [Drive writes per day – a measure of endurance that determines how many times you can overwrite the entire capacity in 24 hours], the N5800 has 3 DWPD.

“Even 1 DWPD is a lot, considering that there are 24 drives in every box,” Commins said. “Not a lot of people write 2 PB a day on an entry level box.”

Commins acknowledged that the N-Series provides more oomph than many of their customers need, especially at this point in NVMEs life, when the price is still fairly high.

“We have tons of mid-range type customers running SQL databases, and this would be overkill for them,” he said. “That’s why we keep the old portfolio intact. Lots of customers still love a $50,000 hybrid array, and that’s all they need.”

Commins also emphasized that all four elements in their portfolio – hybrid arrays, all-flash arrays, multi-tiered flash arrays and now NVMe flash arrays – all run off the same code base, which he contrasted with Pure Storage, the only competitor which has already announced their separate NVMe platform.

“All our different flavors of product run on the exact same code, whereas Pure has a different code on their NVMe box,” he said. “This is all the same code, in different configurations, which gives different entry points for customers based on what they need for price and capacity. If they really want to move the needle from a performance and latency standpoint, they can start with NVMe. Our resellers love this capability, because they can check all four boxes on the same platform, rather than have different point products.”

Tegile will be demonstrating the IntelliFlash N-series at their booth at the upcoming VMWorld, and have announced that it is generally available now through their global partner network. NVMe has not yet actually been released to the market yet, but Commins said that won’t interfere with the ability to sell it.

“A typical sales opportunity takes 90-120 days to close, and we will be shipping in less than 90 days,” he said.