This week I had a call with a new and exciting company called Tintri. Tintri has been flying under the radar for the last couple of years and has worked really hard to develop a new product. Tintri was founded by some of the smartest kids on the block one of which is their current CEO and former EVP of Engineering at VMware Dr. Kieran Harty. But not only former VMware employees, no we are talking about former Datadomain, NetApp and SUN employees. Although it is a rough time for a storage start-up they are jumping in the deep. Although one might wonder how deep it actually is as these are well experienced people and they know how deep they can go and what the weak and strong points are in virtualized environments when it comes to storage.
During the call the folks at Tintri offered to give a demo of how their Storage Unit works. As you know I don’t have a deep storage background like someone as Chad Sakac but I am working with storage on a day to day basis. I look at storage from a different perspective. My interest is usually around management, performance and availability.
From operational/management perspective Tintri VMstore does change things. Tintri VMstore is VM aware, which of course is easier to accomplish when you develop your own filesystem and serve it up as NFS than when using block-based storage. Tintri leverages the VMware vSphere APIs and correlates information with what they have running on top their filesystem. Now why would you want to do that? Well for instance for simple things like Storage Level snapshots per VM, try doing that on the average FC/iSCSI array and you find yourself snapshotting a full LUN or assigning dedicated LUNs to VMs. In both case not an ideal situation.
What makes VMstore special is that on top of the integration with vSphere they also do inline deduplication and compression, meaning that although a 5u VMstore node (5u includes a UPS system) offers you 8.5 TB of usable harddisk capacity it could potentially serve multitudes of that. (Depending on the type of workload of course.) But when it is doing inline dedupe and compression what about performance? Tintri VMstore offers 16 SATA drives. No not just SATA as that probably wouldn’t meet all your performance requirements, no they also offer MLC Flash aka SSD and that is where the dedupe and compression is done. In other words, in order to enable inline dedupe and compression Tintri developed a hybrid filesystem that moves data between SSD and SATA. By the way, VMstore uses RAID-6 for the 1TB of SSD drives it contains and for the 16x1TB SATA drives. If data needs to move it decides that on a pretty granular level, 4kb. Of course VMstore is smart enough to batch these transfers to optimize bandwidth.
Each VMstore node will be served up as a single NFS Share via 10GbE. Do you need more diskspace? Hook up another VMstore node and connect to the NFS Share. Other things that are simplified of course it the management of the VMstore node itself. Need to upload log files? Don’t worry, a single click sends it to the cloud over an SSL connection and Tintri will pick it up from there. No hassling with FTP etc. Same goes for the “call back” system for support, it will upload details to the cloud and Tintri will pick it up.
When they demoed it yesterday most workloads were actually running on SSD at that moment. (The showed me their VDI environment) The cool thing is that you can actually see the performance stats on a per VM level (see screenshot below) or even per VMDK if you want to. On top of that you can also “reserve” performance for your VMs by telling VMstore that these need to be pinned to SSD.
The following is a quote from one of their customers:
Previous attempts to virtualize our Oracle Financials application had failed – as we couldn’t deliver the performance users required,” said Don St. Onge, CIO, TIBCO Software, Inc. “With Tintri VMstore, we saw a 2X performance boost which was more than enough to keep our users happy. Tintri’s unique approach to deduplication and compression lets us run the entire 1TB database instance in only 177GB of flash memory.
Now this might be slightly overstating it, like most press releases do, as I have many customers virtualizing their production tier 1 apps, but the key take away for me is the fact that they run a 1TB database in 177GB of flash and still see a performance improvement. I guess that is due to the beefy specs of the VMstore node which is literally using multiple multi core CPUs.
So in short (copy from Tintri’s press release):
- VM-aware file system designed to service I/O workloads from VMs;
- Seamless flash/disk integration with file system for smooth workload transitions and efficient use of flash capacity;
- Monitoring, control and reporting features on a per-VM and per-virtual disk basis for greater transparency in managing storage for VMs;
- Hybrid flash/disk appliances with inline deduplication and compression capabilities.
So Tintri is hot, fantastic, great… but there must be things that you feel can be improved? Well of course there are…
I would love to see even more integration with VMware. Not only make the VMstore node VM aware but also make vSphere VMstore aware. In others I would expect and love to see plugins which allow you to do most of the VM level storage management tasks within vCenter instead of through the VMstore webinterface. (Although it is a very simple interface which you can learn in seconds.) Also I feel that replication is something that it needs to have. I can imagine it is part of their roadmap but I would rather see it today than tomorrow. Having the ability to enable replication per VM and than only replicate the changed and compressed “chunks” is more than welcome. It would also be great if it had Syslog capabilities so that event correlation is even easier.
My take in short: Tintri VMstore has an interesting approach on the traditional problems virtualized infrastructures are facing, by making their nodes VM aware they are looking to solve these problems. Along the way they are simplifying management and have a very competitive price. Most definitely worth investigating if their solution meets your requirements! Their website specifically calls out “Test and Development” as one of the target solutions for VMstore, I guess by now everyone know what starting with “Test and Development” brought VMware…. Keep an eye out for these guys,
I love to see another NFS based solution hit the market! Network Attached Storage is cloud!
Perhaps it costs $50,000.00 per box to start??
65k is the price i’ve seen for 8tb of usable storage including 1tb of ssd and the mentioned features.
Looks like cool stuff.
But one thing.. Every storage admin I know will see his neck hair stand up immediately when someone implements global inline dedup. The risks are high if metadata isn’t very very well protected. Is there any deep info available how they technically implement dedup?
No I don’t. But I am certain that they have a compelling solutions for it knowing that they once were the forces behind Datadomain/NetApp/SUN etc.
I will ask them though
Hello everyone! Mark and I wrote the Tintri whitepaper and wanted to provide a little extra information about how we do dedupe.
Each data and metadata stored on the system is protected by a checksum, which is verified on every read. Metadata contains a checksum of the data that it refers to, which is verified with the checksum of the data that was read to guarantee referential integrity. When a duplicate block is detected, the original block is read and compared with the new data to ensure that they match.
By the way, we do not dedupe data stored on hard disk, and 8.5TB is a lot of VMs 🙂
This is interesting but not really all that new. What I mean is take a look at EMC. They use VAAI like others to align VM’s with backend, yes we need to create luns in higher I/O performing databases both sequential and random writes, they have intelligent software that uses vmotion to move VM’s to different tiers, they too use deduplication but in a much more effective way more like Avamar less like DataDomain on the chunks and you can schedule it, not all in as the global inline dedupe is not optimal always. SSD’s in EMC are being used in similar ways now too, for fast cache and at the VM level based on how that VM is performing. Much more mature product set with replication and snaps, with new VNXe announcement it is very similar to setting up Tintri with regards to ease and time. Folks will still need physical hosts, which EMC addresses. I will continue to follow Tintri just pointing out some facts
– VAAI doesn’t align anything, it just offloads specific tasks like zero-out / xcopy / locking. that is it.
– I am fairly certain EMC doesn’t use vMotion or SvMotion they move chunks around between different tiers (fast 2) or full VMs with fast.
– In terms of deduplication being “optimal” or not… Test it I would say, saying it isn’t is not enough. These guys have multiple multi-core CPUs so it is powerful.
On top of that Tintri does things on a VM level, snapshots / QoS and Replication in a later stage. I am not a fanboy or anything like that but you’ve got to admit they are trying to change the way people think.
@Jamie – put down the EMC Kool-aid!!
This sounds rather amazing, and I’d love to get my hands on one for testing with! Though quite expensive, considering the amount of SSD in that 8TB unit it’s not too bad, especially with dedupe/compression of that level!
I would assume the $65k for 8.5 TB is most likely MSRP?? Be interesting to see a quote for one and see how its priced.
Also – how will it change with 16 x 2 TB vs. 16 x 500 TB – will they come out with a smaller model to get a less expensive price point.
Wonder how this thing would do with some heavier workloads that dedupe well, like VDI. I had currently been eying down whiptail appliances, but it doesn’t offer really any “vm aware” features… hmmm.
Definitely good stuff, I’ve wondered many times about storage devices built around VMware storage concepts and I must say that Tintri tech sounds very good.
Choosing NFS is also a very clever move, it’s true that VAAI is block-only but I’m sure that VMware is working hard on VAAI enhancements for file-level storage and probably on pNFS too (and VNX supporting NFS 4.1 is probably a hint to that), which will be a clear and simple evolution path for Tintri.
Evostor launched a similar VMware-centric storage at VMworld 2008 but they fell out the radar a couple of months ago without any significant news (and their official domain name is expired as well, evostor.com) if you want to know more about this once-promising startup there’s a gestaltit article here: http://gestaltit.com/featured/top/stephen/evostor-wmware-storage/
@Fabio – do you think they could do the VM-specific stuff without NFS?? I think part of their secret sauce in managing at the VM Level is the integration the vCenter API (or VI API) and the NAS/NFS.
I also forgot that the VNX was going to have NFS but it makes sense – its coming from the Celerra stuff.
Duncan, I’d like to thank you for this blog posting. After I read it, we got in touch with Tintri, test drove their unit for about a month, and today we’ve placed the order to use the unit in our test/dev.
I’ll be happy to share our impressions if you’re interested.
Max, I for one love to get the impressions on your experience with this product. My company is constantly looking for ways to improve VM storage performance. Tintri’s VM-centric approach may be a viable option for us given our large VM footprint.