Things kicked off like normal with these events introductions, agenda, who are Tintri etc. but then things started to change, they have great pedigree with their CEO Kieran Harty being the VP of Engineering at VMware for many years, other key staff from Datadomain and other such well renowned organisations.

Then it happened that Eureka moment! This is not just another storage solution! It is not just using SSDs to speed up the read of data! It is quite different, it works to keep the whole of the data in SSD permanently, only using spinning media for cold data such as powered off VMs, snapshots and replicas. Not only storing but de-duplicating and compressing to make the 1Tb of SSD look like 10Tb, it also writes the data in such a way as to ensure a life of at least 5 years for the SSD drives.

What does this mean to you though? Well a number of things, firstly consistently high performance read and write activity, with 50,000 to 70,000 IOPs sustained and consistent, also a solution that is VM focused, so when you look at the statistics and data it is by VM or you can dig down to the virtual disks inside the VM! Not something’s you can see easily with the current storage providers.

You also get a very high density with 13Tb of usable storage in 3U of rack space!

The statistics come into their own later with a way to identify where bottlenecks are in the system, and historic data for the past 7 days to look back at what has happened to a specific VM and it’s virtual disks, you can also see the relative changes in resources and storage use against the other VMs to highlight changes in behaviour.

Another key piece is in the capacity management, with thin provisioned VMs on a traditional SAN it is difficult to predict what will happen when additional VMs are provisioned into a new storage LUN, with Tintri it will tell you what space is available and what will be the outcome of adding additional VMs on resources.

If you want to know more about Tintri take a look at http://www.tactile-technology.com/tintri/ or fill in the request for information form from the main menu.

You get a simpler way to connect your servers, a way to increase the utilisation of costly cards and have central management of IO.

But what if the longest time spent was tightening the captive screws to hold it into the rack and we could be loading virtual machines onto 8.5TB of usable storage space? Space that has SSDs to improve performance to achieve 50,000 IOPS? And is less than £50k to buy?

This is the new kid on the VMware block Tintri with their initial storage appliance released in April and their second due next month adding dual controllers and replication.

They have some excellent case studies including Tibco and their Oracle Financials application running a dream on VMware and Tintri.

Do you want to get your hands on one? Let us know and we can make it so!