Hybrid flash/disk array startup Tintri claims its business is growing and eating into the sales of traditional array vendors.

Tintri’s VMstore provides storage resources for VMware virtual machines (VMs) without the sysadmin needing to know about LUNs and other traditional storage array abstractions. The arrays are VM-centric in their operation and management.

Tintri's claims:

• Customers have deployed 200,000 virtual machines (VMs) with its VMstore arrays – a near doubling in six months
• Customers are storing more than 16PB of user data in its arrays
• Consecutive triple digit quarterly growth year-on-year
• Many new accounts are spending $1m plus on Tintri products and services
• Close to 70 per cent of Tintri customers made repeat purchases averaging 2.5x of their initial order
• There are more than 1,000 Tintri-certified end-user IT professionals across 31 countries – an increase of 354 per cent compared to July 2013

Okay, let’s try to work out how many VMstores Tintri has sold. Assume an average Tintri array stores 100TB of user data. It would need 160 of them to store 1,600TB (16PB). That doesn’t seem that many.

Or assume an average VMstore can handle 50 VMs. It would need 4,000 to handle 200,000 VMs. A hundred VMs per VMstore would mean 2,000 arrays; two hundred would mean 1,000 arrays and 400 would mean 500 arrays.

Tintri is one of three hybrid array startups – the others are Nimble Storage and Tegile – that say they are rampaging through the mainstream legacy array vendors’ customer bases.

Up until now, these vendors have not reported or admitted much or any concern about the three hybrid musketeers’ effects on their businesses. Startups begin from a low base – where 100 per cent growth can sometimes mean going up from two customers to four – but if we assume they carry on growing at the rates they say they are, this will probably change in the next 12 months. ®

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