Tintri VMstore T7000 Reviews

I have been using it in a hosted multi-tenant environment as a CSP. I am also a consultant who helps Swedish Tintri customers with their on-site installations and configurations, providing support if needed.

Tintri VMstore gives excellent visibility at the virtual machine level. By using the performance statistics for a particular virtual machine, we can see straight away how a VM performed at a specific time. We can see whether there is any issue with low latency or high CPU usage. With the Tintri platform, it is very easy to pinpoint any underlying problems and issues.

Tintri VMstore enables replication, snapshots, and setting QoS at the virtual machine level. This is very important these days. 

I have been in this business for a long time. I have been working with VMware for over 25 years in data operations. Over the last six to seven years, there has been a serious threat of ransomware attacks. Back in the day, you would have a backup and the ability to do a restore because someone deleted a file. Nowadays, you also need to have proper protection when the next ransomware attack comes. The ability to have immutable snapshots is very important so that you can be back on track instantly when the next attack occurs. In my case, it has been a very good tool to avoid an attack and mitigate when an attack has already occurred. There is the simplicity of instant rollback. It does not matter how big the machines are. It is very easy to roll back the machine and get it up and running again.

It enables us to do recovery at the virtual machine level. With Tintri SyncVM, I can do a per-file VM restore. It does not matter if it is a database, file server, or Exchange server. I have a complete copy of the machine from the snapshots where I can do full recovery or recover individual files if needed.

The GUI is excellent when it comes to monitoring performance and capacity on a per-VM basis. I can directly go to the virtual machine, and via the widget in the vCenter GUI, I can see the performance statistics and historical and current performance for the virtual machine. I love the fact that it is so easy to get those numbers. I can also log in to the Tintri Global Center and get the performance data for the last five minutes and up to 30 days for a specific VM. You can use the one you want as a system admin. You can use the vCenter GUI for instant information and recent activities, or you can go into Tintri Global Center for deeper information and historical details.

I worked with the older series of VMstore for many years, which unfortunately are coming to the end of life in February or March. I have been helping a customer in Sweden to migrate to the new T7000 platform. I have one customer who has been using their system for nine years, which is a very long time in these circumstances. Normally, you change storage every three to five years, but this customer has been so happy with their 800 series. The performance of these old series that are coming to their end of lifespan in February or March has been top-notch. The customer has been happy with the performance and total cost of ownership. Having a storage platform for nine years is impressive, not many can do it.

This customer had a highly used and very big SQL Server running for many years. It had several jobs running for days. It was a hybrid VMStore at the time, so it had its limits. I pointed out to the customer to look at this virtual machine or this SQL Server. After we migrated it to the 7000 series, within a couple of weeks, we could see that the performance had significantly increased. Their long-running jobs got completed much faster because the 7000 series is 100% NVMe drives, so it is much faster than the hybrid. We could see a significant increase in performance.

Tintri VMstore could be considered as an extra employee. It takes the load off your employees so that they can focus on other things on a daily basis. The total cost of ownership over time is beneficial when you are using a Tintri solution. Not many understand this. It is very important to point that out to a new user or a new customer. They have to take into consideration all the factors of daily operations. Having Tintri VMstore is like having an extra employee without having to pay them a salary.

It's our main enterprise storage for our in-house cloud.

In our old location, we had a data center that would have air conditioning or power issues. It just wasn't built to support our growth. If they had to do maintenance on the air conditioner, they would bring in portable air conditioning but that never kept the room cool enough while they repaired the facility. With VMstore, we were able to push a button—and it really is that simple—and flip our primary and secondary storage locations by failing over. Then we would migrate our VMs and be running out of our auxiliary data center. When the repairs were done, we'd just click another button and fail back over to spread the resources out the way we had them previously. 

When we migrated to our new facility, we had some single-mode fiber that was connecting the old facility to the new facility. We just paused our replication, then moved half of our VMware servers and half of our Tintri over to the new location and pushed a button to resync any replication that needed to occur over that two-hour period of moving devices. Then we pushed another button and we were running out of the new building. We then picked up half the resources, moved them into the new building, hit the button again and said, "Resync your replication." We never went down or lost any service. Anybody who was trying to e-file or do court work at that time was never affected by our migration. 

Our friends on the Supreme Court of Georgia do not use the same technology as we do. They had to send out letters and emails to all the clerks in the 159 counties we have in Georgia to notify lawyers and the public that they were going to be unavailable for an extended three to five-day period while they migrated their stuff over to the new building. Meanwhile, our court was getting calls from counties that send us 50 to 100 cases a week asking, "When are you guys going to be offline? And we said, "We're not going to be down or offline at all." That was a significant win for us, and it was all because of Tintri and its technology.

Another advantage is that VMstore has reduced administrative time, without question. Previously, we used a product from LeftHand Networks, which was eventually purchased by HP. We had iSCSI connectivity that came with its own set of chores. When you wanted to set up a new LUN, you had to carve it up and do some other steps. With NFS, you create your connection to your storage blob and then you carve it up by folders or however you want. It makes it incredibly easy. Provisioning storage is so simple that it takes clicks to provision it. And once you've done that, you're done. You configure your storage and you present that much storage to your VMware hosts and then decide, by folder, what you want to call it or how you want to carve it up. It becomes very easy and very easy to expand. We're also able to do a lot of thin provisioning.

Back in the day, you had to care about how many spinning disks, how many spindles, about carving out LUNs, and what the performance would be. You had to make all these decisions when you were using older types of storage arrays. All of that has been taken away. It has freed up some staff time to assume more responsibilities in the infrastructure because we're not spending our time carving up LUNS and migrating a VM from one LUN to the next because we're running out of space. It is very easy to use and you can teach somebody how to use it in an afternoon. You can be an IT generalist and understand it.

We use it for all our VMs. It's our primary VM storage. 97% of our architecture is completely virtualized. We won't run a VM unless it's on Tintri. We also use it in our automation. 

Tintri has changed the way that you do NFS for VMs, which is a big deal. Usually, NFS for VMs is very chatty and causes you a lot of problems. Tintri rewrote the NFS for virtuality that allows each basic VM to get its own line at the checkout stand. What this does is that it gives much more response. I don't have problems with performance. I can virtualize pretty much anything without any slowdown or any issues. Plus, I'm easily able to replicate or clone hundreds of VMs up from one in an instance. With automation tied with our Ansible, Tintri is one of the most powerful tools in our toolbox.

It frees up my guys to innovate. They're not dealing with slow storage calls. They're not dealing with performance calls. Storage used to be a big issue where one person was maintaining it all the time. Not having to maintain that storage or groom or manicure that storage gives them the freedom to do other things. Tintri is like its own employee because it allows you to do other things besides storage. It has helped very much to reduce administrative time.

In terms of visibility, it gives me enough ammo so that when all the finger-pointing starts, I can always point to the network and say, "Hey, it's you."

We're constantly developing, iterating, and doing new VMs. So, the ability to move fast and the ability to have high-speed storage is valuable. In the case of something like Atlassian where you work with Jira and you're rolling out your own updates or something like that, you might need to iterate a 500-gig server six times to find all the issues. Even Atlassian will tell you that the first time you upgrade their stuff, it doesn't usually work, so get ready to try it again in your lab. When you are working in a lab environment or need to do things like that, the abilities that the backend of Tintri has are just amazing. They allow you to utilize and take advantage of that. I can spin up five 500-gig VMs without taking a hit to my data store, my performance, or my total overall storage. That's because of the way Tintri does the dedup and the blocks. It has already got all these blocks until the delta gets changed. Even though you've got five 500-gig VMs, which should be 2,500 gigs or 2.5 terabytes, it's not seeing it as that because it has got to compact it and basically zip, but they're all running until the delta gets far enough apart. That allows me to do things I wasn't able to do on my NetApp. It was like you can only have one other copy, and that's it because it's going to be a one-to-one clone. 

It enables replication, snapshots, and setting QoS at the virtual machine level, which is super important. We don't use quality of service because the service is so good. Once in seven years, I might have used that. It's already running and performing. So, the QoS runs on its own. It's great.

We were using Tintri as a delivery mechanism, in a managed service type of environment.

At the time, a decade ago, storage vendors were talking about LUNs, fiber channel, worldwide names, and volumes—and all of the underlying framework of storage. Tintri was coming to the market with a different approach. They said, "You don't have to worry about any of that stuff. We're going to make it easy. If you're using VMware, we take a novel approach and present disks that you can assign to VMs, and they're managed at the VM level." At the time, that was a unique value proposition and turned out to be true. It vastly simplified operations and the associated expense of delivering storage to customers.

Some customers would use it in a primary storage capacity, running virtual machines on it. Others would use it as a replication service. If they had Tintri in their own co-lo facilities or data centers, they would use it as a replication target for block-level replication. The ability to offer hundreds of terabytes of those services and not even require one full-time storage administrator on our side to do so, was frankly a win from an operating expenses perspective, but also a really novel offering when most of the other storage out there really took a lot to manage.

The OpEx improvements are from reduced administrative time, not needing multiple storage administrators dealing with storage day in and day out—the managing of volumes and LUNs, et cetera. That one area has completely disappeared. We don't have to worry about that anymore. That allows our people to focus on more important, value-added functions. It's a bit cliche to say "set it and forget it." But if Tintri is deployed correctly, and the Tintri Global Center stack is configured to allow for machine-learning-based placement of virtual machines, it really is set it and forget it. That is something that has absolutely cut down on administrative time and allowed us to focus on customer value delivery.

Another major benefit accrues to our customers. Customers are looking for two things: for their storage to perform without people having to say constantly, "Let me fix that," or "Let me look into that"; and for protection models that match their organizational commitments and requirements. Some of those commitments are cyber-related and some are contractual. Our customers that have Tintri on-premises want to know that their environments are protected in a fully managed way with immutable recovery and low RTO and RPO. We're able to provide that. The customers that are hybrid or using us in a fully managed service want to know the same thing, but they want to know that we have our arms around that so that they can meet the commitments they're making to their customers, insurers, and their business owners. Tintri has allowed us to do both of those things.

In terms of business impact, the performance of an array is directly tied to 

• what workloads can be delivered 
• how many can be delivered in a given storage ecosystem
• what the performance looks like to the customer. 

I'm certainly not saying Tintri is the only game in town, but when you look at the overall value proposition, from the perspective of a protection model, storage setup, operating expense, administrative overhead, ability to have deep granular visibility, and everything else, it's really hard to compare the Tintri solution unfavorably to anything else. 

Tintri has been a real differentiator for our business that allows us to deliver what we say we will. It allows us not to spend time working on all of the nuts and bolts and underlying things that a lot of other storage vendors require and allows us to focus on the business. We can deliver good business objectives at both the virtual machine and application delivery levels, although the latter is what we really care about. It's not about the virtual machine, it's about applications that are delivering in a way that performs for the business. That has never been in question with Tintri. It allows us to abstract the storage choice away from the delivery of application reliability and performance.

The solution's autonomous operations have impacted IT department productivity positively. Knowing that Tintri Global Center allows for the intelligent placement of workloads, rather than requiring us to keep our hands on the levers, has been helpful. VMware has done this with DRS. The distributed resource scheduling allows for virtual machines to be placed on hosts, based on RAM and CPU and all the other requirements that a business might have. Tintri allows for that to happen at the storage level, and it allows for business objectives to be mapped into that process. For example, we can create application groups in Tintri Global Center and specify what we care about for each group. It uses that, as well as machine learning based on previous choices that we've made, to do things autonomously without somebody having to log in once a week or once a month. It can remember the seasonality of certain workloads to make these decisions in a way that we find to be accurate for the business requirements that we put in place.

We have customers with Tintri in their offices but they don't have the budget to be able to spin up an entire second instance of their office environments in a co-lo and buy multiple storage arrays to do it. They're small to medium businesses, but they still want to be able to have access to features such as immutable backup and recovery capabilities, replicas that exist in a disparate physical location, the ability to spin up machines if there is a problem and have them online with recovery points that are sub-one-hour. Those features are somewhat unheard of in the SMB market. Yes, enterprises have had those features for a long time, and they pay for them and for the staff to manage them. But the ability to say to small and mid-size businesses that they can have all those enterprise features as a managed service is unique.

Another huge aspect is that VMstore enables replication, snapshots, and setting QoS at the virtual machine level. That's especially true when organizations are trying to decide where to invest their dollars at the same time as cybersecurity insurance and Zero Trust security issues are happening around them. The ability to help them feel that they're not choosing between security and productivity, but rather, that the two can go hand in hand on Tintri, helps a lot. Our customers want to know that they have immutable off-site recovery points without having to understand the technical requirements for doing so. We're able to help them be more secure and protected while still delivering good quality of service and delivery of their applications. We're able to add more value for our customers by answering those questions in that way.

VMstore provides fast storage for virtual hosts. We deploy VMstore in various environments. Traditionally, we have primarily deployed it to on-premise servers. However, that has changed in the last two years. More companies are moving to 365, so you have more of a hybrid solution. Either works well because the box is highly adaptable. We're using a T820 currently, but we just signed an order to buy a T7000 series.

We're a telecommunications and IT company. We have a small data center in Leicester that started as a large server room with servers running services for customers who asked us to do different things. The business grew to the point where we hosted virtual machines and remote desktop services for multiple companies. We had to create a proper hosting environment, so we added the Dell Blade and Tintri array. It's housed in a single data center we own and operate.

We currently have six businesses running from that Tintri box, and the end-user accounts number about 500.

Previously, we managed individual servers as hosts with virtual machines running inside. We consolidated about seven individual hosts into one VMstore joined to a Dell blade array that we purchased at the same time. That saves a massive amount of time on ongoing maintenance management. VMstore probably reduces administration time by about 15 to 20 percent. It also saves significant power costs because we've turned off about nine servers in the last seven years. 

What formerly may have taken up a terabyte or two on a server only requires half that on the VMstore. It has increased efficiency while saving time and power costs. It's easier to use and a huge step up in reliability. Overall, it's a high-speed storage solution, which was a significant upgrade.

VMstore has made our company more profitable. We've increased our retail sales and margins while decreasing the time spent managing the solution. We sold this as a significant upgrade to a premium service when moving customers to this new array. Depending on the customer, we increased our retail charges for these services by between 10 and 15 percent. Without fail, every customer paid for it, and they were pleased with the service. 

I use the solution for VMstore storage in my VMware environment.

The product is seamless and very fast. I don't need any admin resources to manage it. We have our IT resources, but I don't need extra personnel for the storage. 

It can be managed by regular IT operations staff, so extra storage staff is not required. It's easy to use and runs itself. 

I have eliminated bottlenecks with storage and have a more secure storage platform using unwritable snapshots. The admin GUI has improved, providing an estimate of future growth, indicating when to invest in more memory, CPU, or storage. This allows me to anticipate when thresholds will be breached within the Tintri Global environment.

Tintri VMstore is the backbone of our ESX estate, so storage and features specific to Tintri connecting to VMware.

The visibility Tintri VMstore provides at the VM level is good. This gives us IOPS per VM. The replication and snapshots that Tintri VMstore enables at the VM level are extremely important for our organization.

While monitoring performance and capacity on a per-VM basis through the GUI is beneficial, it's crucial to focus on the overall storage space that we can readily access and utilize. From that perspective, the GUI's ability to provide this information is highly valuable.

We have been using the T7040 NVMe storage system, and its performance for demanding workloads has been excellent. We upgraded from a T850 to a T7040, and there has been a noticeable increase in speed. The IOPS are significantly faster as a result of the switch from a hybrid flash and disk configuration to a full NVMe flash configuration. The overall performance is very impressive.

The T7040 NVMe storage system has allowed us to do more compared to the previous generation of storage systems. Tintri VMstore has effectively eliminated storage performance issues for our VMware virtual desktop environment. With the enhanced performance and increased I/O throughput provided by Tintri VMstore, end users are experiencing significantly fewer performance-related problems. When Tintri VMstore was first introduced, it was initially purchased for the VDI environment, but its capabilities were soon recognized, leading to its adoption across the entire organization. It has proven to be a valuable asset, meeting all our requirements and exceeding expectations. We evaluated various alternatives before settling on Tintri due to its comprehensive functionality.

Tintri VMstore has streamlined our administrative tasks. We view VMware storage as a unified data repository, so from an administrative standpoint, we connect it to VMware, and it seamlessly provides storage capabilities.

Our VMstore solution has significantly enhanced our disk speeds, particularly for SQL backups. The backup process is now noticeably faster.

We are generally experiencing much improved IOPS for both read and write operations, thanks to our adoption of NVMe throughout our environment.

Implementing autonomous operations has eliminated the need to handle end-user issues, freeing up our time to focus on other priorities.

Additionally, we have successfully migrated specific tasks to Tintri, which was previously not feasible.

We implemented Tintri VMstore on our environment for storage management, and we deployed all our VMs on Tintri. 

We were looking for a solution that was easy to manage and easy to implement. 

In the past, we faced a performance bottleneck with our storage, and we have had instances when NFS mount points got disconnected by themselves. 

Tintri has provided us with stability and faster speed. We were also looking for a solution that is compatible with our existing Hypervisor environment, and Tintri has fulfilled that requirement.

Tintri VMstore has superior performance. It provides us with up to 30% faster performance than our old storage solutions. 

The T7000 series of VMstore has the capability to forecast resource requirements and capacity. Tintri VMStore has a unique filesystem that can manage performance and help us to oversee workloads. 

We have been able to scale up to ten VM storages and 500 VMs through a single pane of glass. That is a big plus for using the Tintri solution. Tintri is easy to automate using Powershell and Rest API.