Tintri Upgrades Storage Appliance For VMware

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Tintri has boosted the capacity of its VMstore storage appliance that's designed to work closely with VMware's virtualization technology.

The company announced this week at VMWorld Europe in Copenhagen that Tintri Model 540 expands capacity over prior models to 13.5 TB of hybrid solid state drive (SSD) and Serial ATA (SATA) hard disk drive (HDD) capacity. This is an increase of 50% over the prior model with a 70% increase in SSD capacity to 2.4 TB, in a 3U, dual controller node.

The Tintri appliance has been integrated tightly with VMware and is designed to help virtual machine administrators. The appliance can report on bottlenecks from the guest operating system layer through to the storage layer, the company said, and it can identify latency at the virtual machine, or vDisk, at any layer of the infrastructure, making it able to pinpoint the source of performance issues.

Tintri's VMstore appliance also addresses an ongoing problem in any VMware installation that involves the misalignment of the guest OS file system and the underlying storage, which results in steadily degrading performance until an alignment utility is run when the storage is out of service. VMstore automatically adapts the storage layer to the guest file system transparently, without any administrative action or impact to service.

[ Virtualization also raises security issues. Check out our Virtualization Security Checklist. ]

Key to VMstore's price-performance is its use of in-line compression and deduplication for primary storage. This maximizes the SSD's ability to serve the hottest data up with minimal latency, while less-used data is held on high capacity, low cost SATA HDDs. VMstore has two controllers in each node, providing a high availability configuration in each model. The new VMstore 540 has four 10-Gbps Ethernet ports and lists at $90,000, yielding a very competitive $4.81 per GB of useable system-level hybrid storage. VMstore has models starting at $65,000. The new model is available now.

Tintri was cofounded in 2008 by Kieran Harty, who was formerly research and development chief at VMware. Tintri is a privately held company based in Mountain View, Calif., with venture funding from NEA and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Tintri is well-positioned to take advantage of the growing demand for shared storage systems in the VMware ecosystem. One of a new crop of storage companies that heavily rely on SSDs to support the I/O demands of hundreds of VMs using the shared storage, Tintri has an experienced management team and deep VMware technical knowledge.

Deni Connor is founding analyst for Storage Strategies NOW, an industry analyst firm that focuses on storage, virtualization, and servers. James E. Bagley contributed to this story.