VM-herder? Tintri's hybrids '60 times' easier to manage than trad dual controller arrays

Sixty times easier to manage: that’s the Taneja Group’s judgment of Tintri hybrid arrays compared to a traditional dual-controller array.

Hybrid array maker and startup Tintri relies on its system software being closely integrated with VMware to separate it out from mainstream array vendors and give it a sustainable advantage so they can’t catch up while it is building its business. One aspect of this is its light touch management.

Tintri’s VMstore software is said to be virtual machine-aware (VM-aware) and presents storage resources - storage objects - from the point of view of a VM instead of storage abstractions like LUNs, volumes, RAID and files. Tintri has had the Taneja Group look at its management facilities.

Taneja’s analyst says VMstore storage operations become VM operations: “vSphere storage operations may look to have full utility, but in reality they come with a long list of serious limitations - including performance penalties, and limitations like requiring snapshot consolidation during any clone event. With Tintri VMstore, those operations become seamlessly integrated with the hardware power of an accelerated storage array.”

Tintri claims it offers “zero management storage” and that appears to be true from the point of view of using vSphere facilities to manage storage through managing VMs - in other words, storage management is cut down and offloaded to virtual infrastructure management.

The Taneja analyst claims Tintri users have a 52X advantage in routine management time and effort when looking after 8,000 VMs: “Tintri can reduce annual time spent on deployment and provisioning to minutes, versus weeks for storage made up of traditional arrays.”

Fifty-two times? Yep, and it gets better: trouble-shooting virtual infrastructure performance problems with Tintri apparently takes minutes instead of days and Taneja’s estimated annual management time and effort impact from Tintri VMstore storage is a claimed 60-times reduction - although we obviously have not tested this ourselves. Even if, as you know, “your mileage may vary,” a claimed 60X difference should give you lots of headroom.

This Tanaja report doesn’t take account either of Tintri’s latest Global Center management software, which carries out centralised administration, control and reporting for up to 64,000 VMs. So it could get even better.

The report’s exec summary says: ”The Tintri VMstore is as close to truly zero management storage as we have ever seen.” But, being picky, it isn’t zero management; a VMstore initial configuration took almost two minutes. OK, compared to a trad storage array that can take four hours it’s impressive, but it isn’t zero (lighten up - ed).

You can download the full report here (24-page PDF) with registration required. ®