New Tintri FlexDrive lets customers expand all-flash storage capacity one drive at a time

Tintri (NASDAQ: TNTR), a leading provider of enterprise cloud platforms, today announced Tintri FlexDrive, a storage expansion feature that enables customers of Tintri all-flash storage arrays to increase system capacity to meet a specific storage need, by adding as little as one drive at a time.

Conventional storage architectures require customers to increase capacity by adding multi-drive RAID groups or drive shelves. Put simply, customers must buy capacity in bulk, typically purchasing more storage than is needed. This adds unnecessary capital expense, rack space and cabling complexity. And once capacity is added, expert administrators still must create LUNs and/or volumes to contain virtual machines.

Tintri's approach to expansion is distinguished by its granularity. Since Tintri operates at the VM-level and eliminates the need for traditional storage constructs such as RAID groups and shelves, customers can purchase a partially populated EC6000 all-flash array and:

1. Add capacity in increments as little as one drive - inserting the drive(s) into any available disk slot.
2. Click a single "expand" button in the Tintri interface.
3. Gain immediate access to new capacity and deploy virtual machines without any further configuration.

This entire process requires no additional rack space or cabling, is completely non-disruptive and takes only a few minutes. Tintri FlexDrive allows customers to purchase capacity in exact relation to need and requires no expertise to deploy.

"We have made yet another storage process far simpler and more cost effective," said Kieran Harty, CTO and co-founder of Tintri. "The introduction of larger flash drives means that a single drive equates to potentially dozens of TBs, reducing the need to add an entire shelf of flash. Tintri FlexDrive changes the way customers should expect to expand capacity - don't deal with the cost and complexity of multiple drives or shelves when you can add capacity in proportion to business need."

Tintri makes it simple for customers to anticipate their need for capacity - Tintri Analytics predicts resource requirements up to 18 months into the future. And now Tintri has incorporated an expansion estimator into its standard user interface so that users can model the impact of adding drives. The estimator uses historical system workload profiles to guide customers to the number of extra drives required, so they can add the best number to meet target capacity.

Tintri FlexDrive software for EC6000 systems will be included at no charge to customers with current support contracts via the Tintri OS 4.4.1 release available later this month.

Tintri VM Scale-out

Tintri FlexDrive complements Tintri's existing approach to scale-out. In May 2016, the company announced VM Scale-out technology. When a customer adds a Tintri system to their footprint, it is treated as a single, federated pool; Tintri automatically optimises the placement of every individual virtual machine across the newly expanded footprint.