Tintri Releases All-Flash VM-Aware Storage
Virtualization and cloud storage developer Tintri today released its first all-flash VM-aware storage (VAS), the VMstore T5000 All Flash Series.
In addition, the Mountain View, Calif.-based vendor upgraded its operating system, which works on the T5000 and its T800 hybrid-flash series, allowing enterprises to mix and match appliances in the datacenter.
"We don’t expect one VM in isolation to perform faster in our flash arrays than in our hybrids. But we have found with a lot of customers who have bought three, five, 10 or more of our VM hybrid arrays, we do find a concentration of particular workloads where having all flash is preferable…" said Chuck Dubuque, senior director of product and solution marketing at Tintri, in an interview.
All flash is best suited for a large multi-terabyte database farm, for example, analytics workloads, and large persistent virtual desktops, he said.
The VMstore T5000 All-Flash series is available in two models: the VMstore T5060 and T5080. The units can store up to 5,000 virtual machines in a 2U form factor and up to 100,000 VMs, 1.4 petabytes of data, and 4 million IOPS in one rack, according to Tintri.
Like the hybrid T800, the T5000 family provides real time, VM-level analytics via Tintri Global Center 2.1, giving enterprise IT departments insight into changes in VM performance and capacity across their infrastructure and multiple hypervisors, the vendor said. These include VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, OpenStack, and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.
The company also took the wraps off VMstack Converged Infrastructure, a VM-aware solution for either the T5000 or T800; multiple hypervisors; compute, and network. Six partners created integrated solutions for certain use cases including VMstack for Server Virtualization, VMstack for VDI, and VMstack for Private Cloud. The server offering optimizes server virtualization based on VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization sized for typical virtualized server applications, according to Tintri. The VDI offering leverages solutions based on VMware Horizon with View or Citrix XenDesktop operating on supported hypervisor platforms, while the last solution targets private clouds based on VMware vRealize Suite or OpenStack that support large numbers of dynamic workloads and a high rate of change, Tintri said.
The vendor hopes its newfound ability to provide both all flash and hybrid storage further extends its reach across its base of large enterprise customers, said Dubuque.
"Generally we come in to solve a particular project issue, maybe a VDI deployment went ok in pilot but when they went into production, performance was terrible. We generally come into a new acct for that individual project and what we discover over time is lots of virtual machines in different use cases get migrated into the Tintri products," he said. "Typically a lot of customers, if 100 percent virtual, might even switch over 100 percent to Tintri. By moving virtual machines off traditional storage their traditional storage behaves much better because it's doing what it's supposed to, where one LUN [logical unit number] equals one application. When you put VMs in there, you put 10, 15, maybe 100 VMs … and their IO gets all blended up. From the VM side you see individual VMs. On the storage side, you see one LUN."
The T5000 All-Flash series can be ordered today with general availability expected for September.
