Tintri introduces new generation of smart storage

“Much has been said about the strategic, operational and organisational implications associated with different cloud delivery models. While discussions about cost, security and application portability for public cloud are still raging, many large enterprises have decided to start their journey to cloud with private cloud. Whether it is on-premises private cloud or off-premises hosted cloud, there is a growing feeling that private cloud provides the most immediate onramp that enables enterprises to start reaping the benefits of the cloud based IT service model,” said Tim Stammers from 451 Research.

The new capabilities of Tintri OS, Tintri Global Centre and Tintri Automation Toolkit provide a compelling and feature-rich foundation for private clouds based on enterprise virtualisation.

“Virtual machines are at the heart of private cloud deployments, which demand a smart storage infrastructure that is simple to deploy and manage, self-tuning and responsive to dynamically changing workloads, and highly automated at the right unit of management: the VM,” said Ken Klein, Chairman and CEO of Tintri. “These are the defining characteristics of Tintri smart storage. Private cloud deployment is one of the fastest growing use cases for Tintri, and these new releases further enable customers on their cloud journeys.”

“We have a highly virtualised environment that requires both rapid updates and scaling, requirements that pose huge challenges for traditional storage. Tintri enables us to easily deploy and tear down virtual machines as needed by demand, drastically increasing the rate of change in cloud environments,” said a customer at the Department of Defense Cyber Range.

Key Capabilities of Tintri OS 3.0 include:
· Multi-hypervisor support

Tintri OS 3.0 adds support for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation based on Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM). Support for multiple hypervisors enables customers to extend the benefits of Tintri smart storage to all of their virtualisation environments and is a key requirement for moving to private cloud deployments. Customers can now deploy multiple hypervisors on a single VMstore.

“Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation is a major component of Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure, which enables enterprises to build and manage their own private cloud environments,” said Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager, Virtualisation and OpenStack, Red Hat. “Tintri’s support for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation, via the new Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation 3.3 API, will provide Red Hat customers an on-ramp to deploy high-level functionality required for robust yet simple cloud computing services based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.”

· RBAC and AD/LDAP integration
Tintri OS 3.0 also includes role-based access control and integration with Microsoft Active Directory and LDAP directory services, providing simple and powerful access control and authentication for a Tintri VMstore on a per user basis.

Key Capabilities of Tintri Global Center 1.1 include:
· VMstore monitoring and reporting
Enables administrators to monitor their VMstores from a cluster-wide dashboard and drill down to individual VMstore dashboards. VMstore-level performance and capacity monitoring along with up to 30 days of historical reports are available for trend analysis and troubleshooting. Users can view aggregated alerts management across VMstores from a single pane of glass.
· Data protection and disaster recovery monitoring
Supports per-VM as well as per-VMstore replication monitoring and topology views for reporting on data protection and disaster recovery service level compliance.
Key Capabilities of Tintri Automation Toolkit include:
· With traditional storage, end-to-end scripting in virtualised environments is complex, error-prone, and requires expert storage-admin level knowledge of various storage constructs, such as LUNs and volumes. With the Toolkit based on PowerShell, virtualisation and cloud data management workflows can be automated with little to no knowledge of traditional storage constructs and commands.

“The release of the Tintri Automation Toolkit provides Tintri partners with a unique opportunity to add value with implementations of storage for virtualisation and cloud,” said Jonathan Kowall, Principal Storage Architect of Sovereign Systems. “Customers want to add capabilities like self-service and policy-based automation. The fact that traditional storage is not scriptable at the VM level is often a major roadblock and breaks end-to-end automation. With the Toolkit, we can help our customers in their journey to private cloud.”

The Tintri OS 3.0 provides enterprises unparalleled density with the ability to run large scale virtualisation and private cloud deployments with up to 2,000 VMs on a VMstore T650. Furthermore, enterprises can now deploy and manage up to 64,000 VMs spread across 32 geographically dispersed VMstore systems from a single Tintri Global Center 1.1 instance.