Gymboree Switches From EMC and NetApp to Tintri All-Flash Platform

Tintri, Inc. announced Gymboree Corp. has replaced Dell EMC and NetApp, Inc.‘s storage solutions to reduce operating costs, eliminate over-provisioning and improve performance with a smaller data centre footprint.

After implementing Tintri’s all-flash platform, Gymboree reduced its storage management time from hours every week to zero.

San Francisco, CA-based Gymboree operates a chain of more than 1,200 specialty retail stores of children’s apparel in the US, Puerto Rico and Canada.

Prior to implementing Tintri’s platform, the company relied on a mix of storage solutions that didn’t perform well with its highly virtualised environment. The company also suffered from bursts of demand for performance from key applications.

“All of our point-of-sale infrastructure, human resources applications and practically every user interface was utilizing VMware at some level,” said Jessie LaCome, Windows and virtualisation IT lead, Gymboree. “In total, we have about 1,000 end users, and a large number of them were complaining about poor application performance issues. We were also seeing a lot of backup and snapshot problems and huge connectivity issues.“

Gymboree evaluated some storage platforms and found Tintri stood out above the rest with its ability to introduce enterprise cloud benefits. Tintri provided a simple installation process and streamlined management with a single view of all VMs. It reduced the resources needed to manage storage by automating common actions and with proactive support that rapidly solves problems before they impact the organisation.

“Our EMC and NetApp systems filled one and a half racks,” LaCome said. “For the same amount of storage capacity, Tintri only fills three rack units. I can fit my entire data centre-including all of our Cisco UCS infrastructure and the Tintri device-into a single rack now. Tintri has enabled us to migrate from our disparate, physical storage systems to a much more powerful and flexible enterprise cloud platform with room to grow.“

“The Tintri enterprise cloud platform was built to work like building blocks, so it can be easily connected to other infrastructure elements. That means Tintri can provide automations and analytics that span compute, network and storage-greatly reducing operating effort and cost,” said Tintri CMO Yael Zheng. “Before installing Tintri, Gymboree storage specialists spent 10 to 12 hours a week managing storage. Now virtualisation admins manage storage in a fraction of the time, and Gymboree has a foundation on which to build an enterprise cloud.“