Back in March I wrote about this new and interesting storage vendor called Tintri which had just released a new NAS appliance called VMstore. I wrote about their level of integration and the fact that their NAS appliance is virtual machine aware and allows you to define performance policies per virtual machine. I am not going to rehash the complete post so for more details read it before you continue reading this article. During the briefing for that article we discussed some of the caveats with regards to their design and some possible enhancements. Tintri apparently is the type of company who listens to community input and can act quick. Yesterday I had a briefing of some of the new features Tintri will announce next week. I’ve been told that none of this is under embargo so I will go ahead and share with you what I feel is very exciting. Before I do though I want to mention that Tintri now also has teams in APAC and EMEA, as some of you know they started out only in North-America but now have expanded to the rest of the world.
First of all, and this is probably the most heard complaint, is that the upcoming Tintri VMstore devices will be available in a dual controller configuration which makes it more interesting to many of you probably. Especially the more up-time sensitive environments will appreciate this, and who isn’t sensitive about up-time these days? Especially in a virtualized environment where many workloads share a single device this improvement is more than welcome! The second thing which I really liked is how they enhanced their dashboard. Now this seems like a minor thing but I can ensure you that it will make your life a lot easier. Let me dump a screenshot first and then discuss what you are looking at.
The screenshot shows the per VM latency statistics… Now what is exciting about that? Well if you look at the bottom you will see the different colors and each of those represent a specific type of latency. Lets assume your VM experiences 40ms of latency and your customer starts complaining. The main thing to figure out is what causes this slow down. (Or in many cases, who can I blame?) Is your network saturated? Is the host swamped? Is it your storage device? In order to identify these types of problems you would need a monitor tool and most likely multiple tools to pinpoint the issue. Tintri decided to hook in to vCenter and just pull down the various metrics and use this to create the nice graph that you see in the screenshot. This allows you to quickly pinpoint the issue from a single pane of glass. And yes you can also expect this as a new tab within vCenter.
Another great feature which Tintri offers is the ability to realign your VMDKs. Tintri does this, unlike most solutions out there, from the “inside”. With that meaning that their solution is incorporated into their appliance and not a separate tool which needs to run against each and every VM. Smart solution which can and will safe you a lot of time.
It’s all great and amazing isn’t it? Or are there any caveats? One thing I still feel needs to be addressed is replication. With this next release it is not available yet but is that a problem now that SRM offers vSphere Replication? I guess that relieves some of the immediate pressure but I would still like to see a native Tintri’s solution providing a-sync and sync replication. Yes it will take time but I would expect though that Tintri is working on this. I tried to persuade them to make a statement yesterday they unfortunately couldn’t say anything with regards to a timeline / roadmap.
Definitely a booth I will be checking out at VMworld.
The realignment of the VMDKs….. that’s guest OS to VMDK alignment?
Yes, between the guest OS and the Tintri FS such that requests that are aligned at the guest OS level will also be aligned at the Tintri FS level.
Does Tintri works with FC storage?
Not sure what you mean with FC Storage?
Tintri offers a NFS based Storage Device. It uses SATA and SSD as disks.
Does Tintri use any guest OS software for storage optimization or is everything done by the appliance outside of the hypervisor?
Outside of the Guest and Hypervisor.
Their new box with the dual controllers is a SuperMicro Super Storage Bridge Bay (SBB). I am currently looking at either buying the Tintri VMstore T540 or building my own using the SuperMicro Super Storage Bridge Bay (SBB) hardware and Nexenta software with the HA and VDC add-ons. The Nexenta solution is about $20K less and has 3TB more capacity but is not a “one throat to choke” solution. These are very attractive solutions for the cost as comparable capacity from the name brands is nearly double the cost.
Just had a sales rep call me yesterday about this gear. I’ve been doing a lot of research on WhipTail’s SSD array – any insight on how Tintri compares?
Also, I’d like to mention this is a first post for me – however I’ve been frequenting your site for some time now. Just like to say thanks for the wealth of info. I’ve found it exponentially insightful – so much so I wanted to give something back, so I bought your HA DeepDive 5; paperback and iBook. 🙂
-Adam
Whiptail is an all SSD based storage array. Different concept than Tintri. Tintri also has sata disks which stores data / vmdks. On top of that Tintri is “VM Aware”. They can do per VMDK level snapshots etc… Different solution.
Perfect – thanks for the clarification.
-A
Cost? This Tintri thing looks great but what’s the cost on one of these units. One of the comments about said that the Nexenta solution is about $20K less !!!! WTH … how much does Tintri cost then 40k,50k,60k ..