Unique innovation means Tintri continues to lead the way in virtual storage

Marcel Fouché

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The fundamental contract that Tintri, which provides products designed for enterprise cloud, virtual machines and containers, holds with a business is to provide predictable and reliable services to support its technology needs.

This is according to a Tintri blog, which notes: “We began our journey by asking a simple question: ‘What should storage look like if it only serviced virtual machines?’”

Tintri’s approach is based on four key operating principles, as follows:

• Performance should be consistent, even if the hardware experiences a failure.
• Every virtual machine (VM) should experience low latency, regardless of its workload profile and whether that changes over time.
• If there is a condition that impedes performance, intelligent infrastructure should give you visibility into what is causing the condition.
• Achieving these benefits should not require storage domain expertise.

“Tintri offers an extensive software suite for server virtualisation, DevOps and VDI, as well as excellent analytics with predictive and efficient insight for virtualised environments and databases,” says Marcel Fouché, Networking and Storage General manager at value-added distributor Networks Unlimited Africa, which distributes Tintri in South Africa.

Dynamic and predictable performance

Tintri prides itself on its dynamic and predictable performance, which is driven by a very specific key feature, namely real-time input/output (IO) profiling of every virtual disk in every virtual machine; and corresponding tuning per virtual machine to achieve low latency.

Resources like CPU, memory and network bandwidth all impact on latency, and Tintri manages all of these resources per virtual machine to ensure all virtual disks have equal access to that ultra-fast storage media.

The result is that each Tintri appliance is consumed as a single datastore. All virtual machines stored in the Tintri datastore will receive all the performance they need as they are being used, and none of the performance if they’re not being used.

Reliability and visibility

Every Tintri appliance is a dual-node cluster in a box. The active-standby architecture ensures that even during a software upgrade, the virtual machines running on the appliance will experience zero impact.

As regards visibility, Tintri appliances are deeply integrated into your virtualisation environment to assist in showing where latency in the stack may lie. Actionable information is surfaced immediately without having to run complex data collection jobs.

Easy installation

Any Tintri appliance can be installed quickly by your team, without the need for any engagement from a professional services organisation.

“Innovations from Tintri deliver unique results in virtualised environments,” says Fouché. “Tintri's intelligent infrastructure for virtualisation was designed to learn, resulting in a different experience with automation and analytics that drastically simplifies operations for virtual machines. Its clients have saved themselves significant hours of management by choosing Tintri to eliminate planning and administration work with automation,” he concludes.