Tintri Inc. announced a scale-out storage platform to enable enterprises and cloud service providers (CSPs) to build their own Amazon-like cloud infrastructure for diverse virtualised workloads.

VMstore T5000

This platform forms the foundation for the industry’s largest all-flash scale-out, with support for up to 160,000 VMs, 10PB and 6.4 million IO/s, for less than $1/GB.

Tintri VM Scale-out
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This announcement includes nine firm’s VMstore T5000 all flash models with capacity expansion capabilities, VM Scale-out software, company’s Analytics for predictive capacity and performance planning, and two firm’s cloud offerings. The simplicity of VAS enables organisations to scale from 17TB to 10PB with one common platform and simplifies storage management.

Tintri Global Center
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“Scale is a defining characteristic of cloud. While many companies aspire to build cloud-scale infrastructures with agility and automation for diverse virtualised workloads, they are held back by conventional storage architecture that is simply not designed to support those requirements,” said Ken Klein, chairman and CEO, Tintri. “Customers have been forced to choose between limited scale-out that requires a large number of disks or expensive and inefficient scale-out, without the benefits of VM-level visibility, QoS and automation. With today’s announcement, enterprises and CSPs can scale far more effectively-building their own Amazon-like cloud infrastructure-with a VAS platform that allows for control, security, cost efficiency and simplicity.“

Scale-out storage platform:

• Federated pool of storage. The federated node design treats multiple VMstores-both all-flash and hybrid-flash nodes-as a pool of storage, simplifying management, planning and resource allocation.

• Scalability and performance. The storage platform is designed to scale to more than one million VMs. Separation of control flow from data flow ensures low latency and scalability to a large number of storage nodes.

• Scale from small to very large with new and existing, all flash and hybrid, partially or fully populated systems.

• VM and software based. Based on software intelligence that delivers consistent performance for virtualised and cloud applications. It works across any standard high performance Ethernet network, eliminating the need for proprietary interconnects. The VM Scale-out software automatically provides best placement recommendation for VMs.

• Scale compute and storage independently. Loose coupling of storage and compute provides customers with flexibility to scale these elements independently.

VMstore T5000 all-flash with expansion capabilities: the company first introduced the VMstore T5000 all-flash series in August 2015. Today, all three models, the T5040, T5060 and T5080, are updated with new capacity options ranging from 17 to 308TB. In the future, the firm will also enable capacity upgrades with some of these models to allow customers to scale up their individual VMstores. Combined with VM Scale-out software, customers can scale with complete flexibility, growing from one T5040 all flash system to 32 fully populated T5080s.

VM Scale-out Software provides following capabilities:

• Predictive analytics derived from one million statistics collected every 10 minutes from 30 days of history, accounting for peak loads instead of average loads, for the most accurate predictions. Deep workload analysis identifies VMs that are growing rapidly and applies sophisticated algorithms to model the growth ahead and avoid resource constraints.

• Least-cost optimisation based on multi-dimensional modelling. Control algorithm constantly optimises across the thousands of VMs in each pool of VMstores, taking into account space savings, resources required by each VM, and the cost in time and data to move VMs, and makes the least-cost recommendation for VM migration that optimises the pool.

• Retain VM policy settings and stats. When a VM is moved, not only are the snapshots moved with the VM, the statistics, protection and QoS policies migrate as well using efficient compressed and deduplicated replication protocol.

• Supports all major hypervisors.

“With hundreds of terabytes of data across thousands of VMs, our business runs on scale. Conventional scale-out promises scale but struggles beyond hundreds of VMs-it doesn’t give us flexibility in how and what to scale, nor the intelligence to predict workload demands,” said Jeff Wilhelm, CTO, Envision Technology Advisors LLC. “Tintri’s Scale-out architecture and VM Scale-out technology will do for storage what VMware’s vSphere and DRS did for compute. The notion of tripling and quadrupling our virtualised infrastructure without adding the corresponding number of dedicated storage personnel has tremendous appeal to us. Combined with advanced analytics, QoS, automation, and policy-based VM management, this gives us a powerful platform to build a very agile virtualised infrastructure.“

“Tintri’s VM-aware storage is ideal for our customers who are looking for simplified management and high performance. With the new scale out storage platform our customers will be able to grow their own IT infrastructure with Tintri. Unlike traditional scale out storage the Tintri solution can support tens of thousands of VMs, which is perfect for any enterprise or growing organisation. There is also the added bonus of Tintri’s predictive analytics which will automate the entire process and guarantee QoS,” commented Chris Barnes, manager, vendor alliance, S3 (Solid State Solutions, part of Capita Plc).

Tintri Analytics
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Analytics
The company has always offered real-time, VM-level analytics as part of its Tintri OS and firm’s Global Center management system. This foundation expands to include a SaaS offering of predictive analytics that provides organisations the ability to model both capacity and performance requirements. Powered by big data engines such as Apache Spark and Elastic Search, Tintri Analytics is capable of analysing stats from 500,000 VMs over several years in one second. By mining the rich VM-level metadata, Analytics provides customers with information about their environment to help them make better decisions about applications behaviours and storage needs.

Cloud suites
Company’s cloud combines the power of the scale-out platform and the performance of all-flash VMstores, with the simplicity of its VAS software portfolio to enable organisations to build their own private cloud.

Customers can start with a single VMstore T5040 with 17TB of effective capacity and scale out to the Foundation Cloud with 1.2PB in eight rack units. Or they can grow all the way to the firm’s Meta Cloud which delivers a 10PB cloud-ready storage infrastructure for up to 160,000 VMs, delivering over 6.4 million IO/s in 64 RU for less than $1/GB effective. And company’s VM-aware storage is so easy to manage that organisations can quickly scale from 17TB to 10PB.

Both the Foundation Cloud and Meta Cloud include company’s complete suite of software offerings for storage management, VM-level analytics, VM Scale-out, replication, QoS, and lifecycle management.

The VMstore T5000 All-Flash Series with new capacity options is available through the company and authorised resellers. Analytics is available to customers with current VMstore support contracts.

VM Scale-out will be available through Global Center Advanced, which will be available in June 2016 as both a separate software license and a part of the firm’s Software Suite, which consists of Global Center Advanced, ReplicateVM, SecureVM and SyncVM. Upgrades will also be available for existing Global Center Standard customers.

Foundation Cloud and Meta Cloud will be available for purchase in June 2016 through the company and authorised resellers.