Aer Lingus opts for Tegile arrays, snubs EMC in shock move

Aer Lingus, the Irish airline, has equipped itself with Tegile hybrid arrays instead of upgrading its existing EMC kit.

The airline will use Tegile's Zebi HA2800 arrays to store data for SQL databases, data warehousing and VDI deployment because it was unable to scale at the speed necessary with its existing EMC arrays.

Aer Lingus says the Zebi arrays also provide more accessible and economical storage than the EMC kit. The Tegile gear will run alongside the existing EMC kit – which has, we presume, lost a stream of upgrades in the future.

IT architect Brian Price, of Aer Lingus, said: "With the legacy EMC storage, as soon as we reached our storage limit, we had to go back to the vendor to buy additional storage space. This was both costly and an inefficient use of our IT team's time."

He said that through buying the Tegile kit "storage is no longer an issue at Aer Lingus."

The airline has moved corporate file share and other critical data, it says, to the Zebi arrays. It uses dedupe and compression, which the Tegile kit does in real time, to update files between its two data centres.

Tegile's hybrid arrays use flash storage and spinning disk, like a hybrid VNX array, but it has ground-up designed software rather than a mature disk-based software stack; less well optimised for flash and the flash-disk storage mixture than the Tegile software.

Aer Lingus evaluated Apache and HP alternatives as well as Tegile and it's a testament to the efficacy of modern hybrid arrays that it went with a startup. Tegile, Nimble Stirage and Tintri are shaking up mainstream vendors' attempts to hybridise their legacy arrays because they have, we understand, better system software and lower prices. How will the mainstream vendors react? ®