Clearwater Analytics Opts for Tintri All-Flash Storage

Tintri, Inc. announced Clearwater Analytics has purchased its all-flash storage to accelerate performance and simplify management of development and production workloads.

Based in Boise, ID, Clearwater Analytics provides web-based investment portfolio accounting, reporting and reconciliation services for corporate treasuries, insurance companies, investment managers, banks, governments and other institutional investors in the US and around the world. It aggregates and reconciles daily reports on more than $2 trillion in assets across thousands of accounts.

Before adopting Tintri, Clearwater Analytics used NetApp, which was difficult to manage and provided inadequate performance for development and production workloads.

“We originally purchased NetApp appliances, but after we started putting workloads on them, we discovered that they weren’t measuring up to all of our requirements,” noted Shawn Toller, system administrator, Clearwater Analytics. “For example, on their firmware updates, if everything goes well on NetApp, an update can take two and a half hours. If it goes poorly, it can take a lot longer – or stall completely.“

After evaluating three other vendors, Clearwater Analytics chose Tintri for its faster performance and simple management. It purchased two Tintri T5040 systems and have a total of four Tintri all-flash systems deployed at two separate sites, running around 3,800 VMs for their development and production workloads.

“We did the initial deployment ourselves. The Tintri systems almost set themselves up, so the deployment was very simple and extremely fast,” said Toller. “With Tintri, I can kick off an update and then walk away knowing it’s going to work without any glitches.“

Before adopting Tintri, it could take up to three hours to restart all of the VMs at one of Clearwater’s sites. With Tintri, Clearwater can conduct a rolling restart of everything in less than 30 minutes. Clearwater manages its infrastructure with Tintri Global Center to troubleshoot hotspots and identify current issues or future problems.

“The Tintri systems have exceeded our performance expectations. Even with the demand our infrastructure generates, we have not yet been able to apply enough pressure to max out the systems,” Toller concluded.