Mitsubishi Polyester Film Moves Up to Tintri

Tintri, Inc. announced that Mitsubishi Polyester Film GmbH (Mitsubishi) is using Tintri VMstore to manage its virtual estate.

In the short time since implementing Tintri, Mitsubishi has realized a 2x performance improvement, 10x reduction in troubleshooting time, and 15% reduction in cost.

Mitsubishi is among the largest suppliers of polyester (PET – polyethylene terephthalate) film in the world.

Since 1954, its European site and headquarters in Wiesbaden, Germany, have produced high-quality, HOSTAPHAN biaxially oriented polyester film. PET film is used in a variety of technically demanding industry applications, including base films for magnetic tapes and capacitors, food packaging, medical applications, and for pharmaceutical purposes.

IT and Business Challenges
Mitsubishi was relying on a NetApp storage environment.

“The NetApp systems were very complex from an administrative perspective,” explained Thomas Zimmerman, manager of information services, Mitsubishi. “It was very difficult to determine what was causing a problem or to diagnose issues in any of the virtual machines. We needed to install several different software packages just to manage the environment, including NetApp Systems Operation Manager. We were ready to add more capacity, but we didn’t want to upgrade the existing NetApp environment.”

Moving to Tintri
Zimmerman and his team began investigating new options for replacing the aging NetApp storage infrastructure: “We had originally decided to look at Compellent and HP, but our OEM hardware partner, MightyCareSolutions GmbH, suggested we check out the Tintri solution instead. They told us that Tintri was designed for virtualized environments. They felt it would be the best solution for all of our needs, especially for our virtual desktop deployment.”

Mitsubishi did not run a formal proof of concept on the Tintri device.

“In addition to listening to the good advice from MightyCare, we had a teleconference with several people at Tintri,” noted Zimmerman. “We described our situation and they recommended the right models. Tintri then provided us with a box for testing. We were exceptionally pleased with the performance and manageability of the test unit, so we decided to purchase the Tintri solution.”

The Tintri appliance was easy to install, according to Zimmerman: “We had the Tintri up and running in less than an hour. We could have done it even faster, since that hour actually included a half hour chat with the Tintri engineers. Installing the NetApp appliances always took at least a day and a half, due to the complexity of the environment. Everything is so much simpler with Tintri.”

Easier Management and Troubleshooting
Mitsubishi was using a NetApp MetroCluster, with FC, iSCSI, and NFS.

“Normally, a NFS environment is easily adoptable,” Zimmerman explained. “But if you add in FC and several other solutions, it becomes much more complex. For example, you have to check for multi-pathing to see if everything is working well, and in the case of failover, you have to check for parsing. With Tintri, you just enter the IP address, mount it, and you’re done. It’s an amazingly easy environment to manage.”

The Tintri administrative interface provides the ability to see performance and capacity metrics on each of the individual virtual machines.

“If you want to do any diagnostics on the NetApp – it is possible of course – but you have to open several different browsers, switch back and forth from one management interface to another, and then scroll down to select the appropriate menu functions from each management console,” Zimmerman said. “It’s very complex. It used to take an average of 30-40 minutes to obtain information on each desktop with NetApp. With Tintri, it takes just one or two minutes to check virtual desktop performance. On average, the Tintri solution is at least 10 times faster than NetApp for diagnosing problems or pinpointing the source of any issues.”

With Tintri’s simplicity and ease of management, Mitsubishi has been able to free up its storage admins for more strategic roles.

“Our IT admins had to attend specialized training at NetApp to manage the appliances. Tintri is so easy, our admins can manage the systems without any training. Now everyone on our IT team can easily work with the Tintri systems, not just our storage specialists.”

Better Performance at Lower Cost
Mitsubishi is currently running 300 virtual desktops on the Tintri platform.

“All of our applications are running much faster on Tintri, especially the applications that are very write-intensive,” Zimmerman reported. “Our virtual desktops are two to three times faster on Tintri than on NetApp.”

Mitsubishi was able to purchase the entire Tintri solution for less than the price of adding additional NetApp appliances to the existing environment.

“We were able to reduce CapEx by more than 10%, but the largest reduction we realized was in our operational expense,” Zimmerman reported. “The Tintri appliances are so easy to manage and support, that we have reduced our operational efforts by at least 10 to 15% as well.”

Conclusion
Mitsubishi has moved nearly all of its workloads over to the Tintri platform.

“A few workloads are still running on the old NetApp devices using FC, but we will eventually move them over to Tintri as well,” Zimmerman said.

Mitsubishi’s IT team is now working on a project to expand the company’s data centers, and plans to purchase two or three additional Tintri appliances over the next few months.

“Our plan is to use Tintri for all of our workloads going forward,” Zimmerman concluded. “I have already recommended Tintri to three of our customers here in Germany at VMworld. I am doing this because I really believe Tintri has created one of the best and most innovative IT solutions in the market today.”