Tintri shrinks its all-flash entry-level to $125K door-opener

Tintri has added an entry-level all-flash array to its range, with an updated OS and predictive analytics functions are coming to model capacity and performance trends.

The company has three hybrid flash/disk arrays and, now, three all-flash arrays, the newest one being the T5040. These arrays are managed by VM administrators, Tintri having pioneered a VVOL-type approach to provisioning.

Its arrays have various amounts of storage capacity and are characterised by the number of virtual machines they can support. The T800s are 4U hybrid flash and disk products with the T5000s being 2U all-flash arrays. A rack-full of T5000s supports up to 100,000 virtual machines, 1.4PB of data and 4 million IOPS.

The T5000s are intended for large database farms and large persistent virtual desktops, with the T800s being for most server virtualisation, VDI, private cloud and test and development use cases.

The T5040 has 5.76TB of raw flash capacity, which Tintri says can mean up to 18TB of effective capacity after data reduction, and supports (stores) up to 1,500 virtual machines. Tintri’s product range now has six members:

Tintri Product Range

If we chart the range in terms of raw capacity and number of VMS supported we get a clear positioning diagram:

Tintri array positioning in VM/raw capacity space. The orange boxes are the hybrid models with the yellow boxes being all-flash arrays.

Tintri OS v4.1 provides support for XenServer, with concurrent hypervisor support now including this plus vSphere, Hyper-V, RHEV and OpenStack. The arrays don't have to be dedicated to single hypervisor environments.

Hyper-V enhancements includes SyncVM File-level restore, WMI Path Encryption, snapshot enhancements, and PowerShell cmdLets. VVOL support enables snapshots, clones, revert, visibility and statistics at the VM level through vCenter operations, and QoS from Tintri Global Center.

Tintri Analytics builds on the existing metadata facilities, and use VM Aware Storage insights to build profiles of a customer’s VMs and applications. This is so it can model the growth of applications and any need for added capacity and performance, including throughput. The company says it will offer a definitive past, present and future view of application-level performance data to help data centre admins.

The list price for the T5040 is $125,000. It can be ordered now and will be available later in December as will Tintri OS 4.1. That software will be a free upgrade for in-support customers. ®