Last year our storage arrays were approaching the end of their life and we needed to expand both capacity and performance together to facilitate growth in our Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) business, so we went to see what was on the market. We looked at both all-flash and hybrid arrays, but many products still addressed the storage the same as traditional storage does. – LUNs etc.
When we looked at Tintri I was struck by three key things:
- Guaranteed Performance
Tintri guarantees performance for all virtual machines, so a very busy VM isn’t going to negatively affect others, which is sadly exactly what you get with a traditional SAN.
- Visibility of Performance
It has a great GUI which lets you quickly look at latency and throughput and therefore see immediately if the performance issue is on the server, network or storage. For years we had been spending thousands on complex reporting tools which didn’t give us the same level of information.
- It de-skills storage management
Tintri almost completely de-skills the operation and management of storage. When working with traditional SANs you need people with very specialist knowledge, because if you don’t know what you are doing it’s easy to make a mistake. Anybody that is VM trained can use Tintri storage, which gives much more flexibility.
After evaluating all the options, Tintri was the clear choice so we purchased some VMstore T850 boxes, bolted them into the rack, connected them to the network and off we went. Then we used VMware vSphere® Storage vMotion® to do a live migration without any service disruptions, the whole process couldn’t have been any easier!
Since moving to Tintri we know exactly what performance to expect, so it makes any planning easy and we have saved both time and money as there is virtually no storage management anymore. I would also recommend the VMware vRealize Operations plugin, as we can see everything going on within the Tintri estate on one pane of glass.
Everybody was so impressed with Tintri in our IaaS business that we decided to add it to our product portfolio as we can see that on-premise customers who also run a Virtualised server environment will benefit massively, just as we have done.
Contact us today for more information on Tintri and VMware products and how they can improve your VM environment.
