In industry marketing circles, the term “hybrid array” is typically used to describe a data storage appliance that combines fast and expensive solid-state-memory with cheaper but slower mechanical disk. Tegile Systems Inc., which one of the faster-growing names in the ring, is venturing off the beaten track with a fresh product approach that it says improves the performance and cost-effectiveness of both media.

“Hybrid is not just flash and disk,” said Rob Commins, vice president of marketing at Tegile, in his appearance on SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE at the recently concluded VMworld 2014 conference.  “If you back up one layer from that – it’s a performance layer and a capacity layer.” The company’s IntelliFlash software architecture, which is claimed to achieve the much-coveted middle ground between performance and cost.

Thinking outside the array

The platform provides users with the option of swapping out the disk tier of their arrays with what Commins referred to as “cheap and deep” solid-state memory that is considerably faster but doesn’t cost nearly as much as the higher-grade drives used in all-flash systems from competing vendors. That pool of reasonably-responsive capacity connects to a high-speed cache that constitutes the “performance layer” of Tegile’s systems, he explained. This kicks in during short-lived usage spikes such as “boot storms” that occur during the first 90 minutes of the workday when employees fire up their desktops.

This architecture can be useful in other scenarios, however. Commins told host Dave Vellante that the data reduction services built into Tegile’s arrays increase the effective capacity of the cache fivefold, thereby making it possible to deliver the performance of high-grade flash for a proportionally larger amount of information.

The same deduplication and compression algorithms also work with regular hybrid configurations that incorporate disk, a feature Commins hailed as an important differentiator for his firm.  “The people that have gone all-flash use data deduplication and compression to drop the price of flash, but what they’re not doing is applying the same algorithms to disk,” he said. Tegile uses the same practices to reduce the cost of both media, he said.

That approach reduces cost per gigabyte to “well under a dollar” for the disk portion of the array, according to Commins, which he said is three to five times lower than the average for all-flash alternatives. The catch is that deduplicating and compressing data takes a fairly large toll on the the already sluggish performance of the mechanical drives, but he told Vellante that the resulting reduction is more than offset by the speed improvement afforded with Tegile’s high-speed cache.

Watch the full interview with Commins below.