Tintri Intros New Hybrid Flash, Disk Storage Environments

Tintri, a developer of hybrid flash and disk appliances aimed specifically at VMware environments, on Tuesday introduced new versions of its VMstore appliances targeting both larger and smaller customers looking to improve their storage performance.

Tintri will start shipping its new VMstore T600 series in the fourth quarter, said Geoff Stedman, vice president of marketing for the Mountain View, Calif.-based company.

Tintri's current appliance is the VMstore T540, with capacity of up 13.5 TB to provide storage for up to 1,000 virtual machines.

[Related: VMworld 2013: 20 Must-See Storage Offerings (Part 1) ]

The VMstore T620 is targeting midmarket businesses with the ability to serve up to 500 virtual machines with 13.5 TB of capacity. The VMstore T650, targeting more enterprise-class workloads, can serve storage for up to 2,000 virtual machines with its useable capacity of 33.5 TB.

Tintri also unveiled the Tintri Global Center, a single-pane-of-glass management software for managing multiple virtual machines as one, Stedman said.

Tintri, which in 2011 unveiled its first hybrid flash and spinning disk array, currently supports over 200 customers who have over 80,000 virtual machines running on the company's hardware, Stedman said.

"We provide a storage products with zero management," he said. "We eliminate the tuning, LUNs, and so on. We let customers manage their virtual machines, and not their storage."

Tintri has turned out to be a good channel partner with technology that fits perfectly in VMware-based virtualized environments, said Drew Mogan, director of engineering at Integrated Archive Systems (IAS), a Palo Alto, Calif.-based solution provider and Tintri partner since the storage vendor came out of stealth mode.

Mogan called the introduction of Tintri's new appliances a good move for its channel partners.

"Tintri's story was easy to tell," he said. "But people want options. Tintri definitely needed something on the lower end. Even a discounted T540 was still too expensive for many smaller shops. Some smaller shops are still using Gbit Ethernet because they can't afford 10-Gbit Ethernet."

The VMstore appliances were designed for VMware virtualized environments, and they prove it with every sale, Mogan said.

"I can say no other product is easier to configure for VMware environments," he said. "In less than an hour, customers can be up and comfortable enough to go into production."

Tintri VMstore presents itself as a datastore into the virtualization layer, said Sachin Chheda, product and solutions marketing director for the storage vendor.

"Tintri's architecture actually tracks the individual virtual machines," Chheda said. "Tintri scales by adding data stores into a VMware environment. Customers want one view to give them insight into all their VMstore systems."

PUBLISHED OCT. 9, 2013