Tintri FlexDrive to Expand All-Flash Storage Capacity

Tintri, Inc. announced its FlexDrive, a storage expansion feature that enables customers of all-flash storage arrays to increase system capacity to meet a specific storage need, by adding one drive at a time.

Conventional storage architectures require customers to increase capacity by adding multi-drive RAID groups or drive shelves. Put simply, customers must buy capacity in bulk, typically purchasing more storage than is needed. This adds unnecessary capital expense, rack space and cabling complexity. And once capacity is added: expert administrators still must create LUNs and/or volumes to contain VMs.

Tintri’s approach to expansion is distinguished by its granularity. Since it operates at the VM-level and eliminates the need for traditional storage constructs such as RAID groups and shelves, customers can purchase a partially populated EC6000 all-flash array and:

1. 1/ Add capacity in increments as little as one drive-inserting the drive(s) into any available disk slot
2. 2/ Click a single ‘expand’ button in the interface
3. 3/ Gain immediate access to new capacity and deploy VMs without any further configuration

This entire process requires no additional rack space or cabling, is completely non-disruptive and takes only a few minutes. FlexDrive allows customers to purchase capacity in exact relation to need and requires no expertise to deploy.

“We have made yet another storage process far simpler and more cost effective,” said Kieran Harty, CTO and co-founder, Tintri. “The introduction of larger flash drives means that a single drive equates to potentially dozens of terabytes, reducing the need to add an entire shelf of flash. Tintri FlexDrive changes the way customers should expect to expand capacity-don’t deal with the cost and complexity of multiple drives or shelves when you can add capacity in proportion to business need.”

Tintri makes it simple for customers to anticipate their need for capacity – Tintri Analytics predicts resource requirements up to 18 months into the future. And now the company has incorporated an expansion estimator into its standard user interface so that users can model the impact of adding drives. The estimator uses historical system workload profiles to guide customers to the number of extra drives required, so they can add the best number to meet target capacity.

Click to enlarge

FlexDrive software for EC6000 systems will be included at no charge to customers with current support contracts via the Tintri OS 4.4.1 release available later this month.

Tintri VM Scale-out
FlexDrive complements Tintri’s existing approach to scale-out. In May 2016, the company announced VM Scale-out technology. When a customer adds a Tintri system to their footprint, it is treated as a single, federated pool; It automatically optimises the placement of every individual VM across the newly expanded footprint.