storage ICT
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http://dcsuk.info/n/ckms
Total virtualization
As virtualization becomes all-pervasive in the data centre, end users are discovering that general purpose shared storage, designed long before server virtualization came into existence, is poorly adapted to both flash and virtual environments. Purpose-built flash storage for VMs is the solution, as Marcus Chambers, Tintri’s European Vice President, and Gurdip Kalley, Business Development Director at S3 - a Tintri UK Channel partner – discuss.
QPlease can you provide some background on the company – when formed, key personnel etc.?
A MC: Tintri accelerates virtualization with purpose-built flash storage for VMs. Tintri was co-founded by Dr. Kieran Harty, who
formerly led development as EVP of Engineering at VMware from 1999-2006. Tintri’s team also includes senior leaders and industry experts from Citrix, Data Domain, Google, NetApp and Riverbed. Tintri was founded in 2008 and is a privately-held company based in Mountain View, CA, with sales offices in Europe and Asia.
QAnd what does Tintri bring to the storage market – ie why ‘another’ new storage vendor?
A MC: Tintri’s vision is simple: everything in the data center should be virtualized. As such, the company built a VM-aware storage
appliance that’s exclusively intended for virtual machines. Its custom architecture – which relies heavily on flash – was built to optimize the performance of virtual machines. There are no LUNs or volumes; VM and storage administrators can manage their VMs from a simple dashboard with a user-friendly UI that allows them to manage deployments on a per-VM basis and instantly visualize performance bottlenecks.
QIn more detail what technologies and products does Tintri offer?
A MC: As virtualization becomes the new normal, every aspect of IT is adapting to virtualization. However, general-purpose shared storage – designed 20 years before VMware popularized server virtualization – is poorly adapted to both flash and virtual environments. Designed from the ground-up for flash and virtualization, Tintri’s VM-aware storage appliance delivers flash
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performance at disk prices with intuitive management specifically for VMs.
QPlease can you provide more detail on the VMstore technology that seems to underpin your product set?
A MC: The Tintri VMstore file system is designed from the ground-up for VMs. It uses virtual machine abstractions — VMs and
virtual disks — in place of conventional storage abstractions such as volumes, LUNs, or files. Each I/O request – reads, writes, or metadata operations – map directly to the particular virtual disk on which it occurs. Tintri VMstore directly monitors and controls I/O performance for each virtual disk.
Tintri VMstore is designed to fully capitalize on the most cost-effective flash technology available. Multi-level cell (MLC) flash – combined with inline deduplication, compression, and a unique flash/disk file system – enables Tintri to cost-effectively run the majority of enterprise applications with flash-level performance.
QAnd what are the USPs of the Tintri product range?
A MC: List price for the T445 is $65,000, and the T540 list price is $95,000.
QSpecifically, can you say a little bit about each of the following in relation to how they are addressed by your product portfolio:
MC: Managing VMS directly Tintri VMstore™ is VM-aware and eliminates complexity by relating the storage infrastructure directly to the VMs and business applications. There are no LUNs or volumes, tiers, RAID groups or other traditional
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