This week Tegile announced that it has opened an office in the United Kingdom to strengthen customer ties in the region. Paul Silver will lead the London branch as the company’s VP of Europe Middle East and Africa (EMEA).

Silver has worked in the IT industry for 20 years. According to Tegile the executive established his reputation as a “startup specialist” on the back of his contributions to a number of startups, including desktop virtualization vendor GreenBytes. Prior to his stint at GreenBytes Silver worked for EqualLogic, where he led EMEA operations until Dell took over in 2007.

“I could not have hoped to find a more perfect fit than Tegile to build the next sales success story,” said Silver. “With a hugely disruptive product offering at the intersection of solid state storage and virtualization, Tegile’s no-compromise storage technology is poised for an unlimited success in Europe.”

Tegile’s expansion to Europe coincides with the launch of its new “Don’t Overpay for Storage” promotion. Under the program, the vendor will donate $2,500 to a college scholarship fund for every array purchased by a higher education institution through June 30. Tegile says that its Zebi hybrid storage systems leverage a combination of homegrown software, flash and low-cost disk to deliver a higher return on investment than pure-flash alternatives. The arrays are used by Washington and Lee University, the Ventura and Mira Costa community colleges in California, and the University of the Pacific.

Education is expanding in all directions. A few days ago the company teamed-up with co-location provider Voonami to offer a managed replication service to existing Zebi users. The two firms have maintained a strong relationship ever since Voonami deployed Tegile’s arrays in its two data centers.