Tintri VMstore T7000 Reviews

We are a small shop, not having to manage LUNs, disk type and disk tiers has allowed us to focus more on overall health of our virtual environment and not the day-to-day challenges of traditional LUN-based SANs.

It has easy setup, easy administration, and no LUNs! Performance for the price is amazing. It has QoS per VM and great overall performance tracking.

The Tintri OS and GlobalCenter software do a great job of showing you troubled VMs, however it still could be a bit more helpful in diagnosing the issues. We have had a couple Linux VMs that went out of control with IOPs and Tintri showed us that, but we still had some digging to find out why. So adding some more detailed information as far as where the IOPs issue is coming from would really help.

We've had no issues with the stability.

This is our main love of these units -- connect to VMware and Tintri monitor and manage your performance.

Customer Service:

Amazing, only a couple of support call so far, and they were small things. Tintri was great with their response and assistance.

Technical Support:

10/10 - we have had two cases open with Tintri, a bad power supply, which they quickly replaced and a issues with snapshots which was fixed with an OS update. Both cases were handled quickly and professionally.

We had both CORAID and EMC, but all Tintri now. This is hard for me, we have had so many issues with our past storage systems, CORAID (which we have totally decommissioned) and our EMC storage systems, that our Tintri systems have just been perfect. I know that sound a bit biased, but it is not, I have been a storage administrator for almost 20 years and the past eight months with two Tintri units has been hands down the best.

It was easy to setup.

Tintri did free install with an engineer but we didn't really need it.

We are a smaller IT shop and even the T820 is a bit large for our needs, which means we are paying for more storage space than we need, so something a bit smaller/cheaper would be nice.

We looked at NetApp, Tegile and Nimble.

Seriously, my 20 years in storage and this is the best solution I've ever used hands down. The company is great to work with as well!

We use it mostly for our VM storage.

The benefit we have seen is the simplification. Using Tintri has been more of a set-and-forget-it situation where I trust that Tintri performs as expected. And it does. It definitely reduces administrative time. Once I set it up I barely had any issues with storage.

The cloning is very fast.

Also, the fact that VMstore enables you to do replications, snapshots, and setting QS at a virtual machine level is awesome because it's more of a set-and-forget-it type of situation.

Another aspect I like is that it's very simple. It's an easy GUI to use.

I have not had any major problems with it except that one of the controllers failed one time. But that didn't hinder performance because there were two of them.

A feature like replication for disaster recovery would be nice.

I have been using Tintri VMstore since 2016-2017. I used one of the earlier models with no SSDs. It was mostly physical drives.

It's very stable. I've never had any problems with Tintri. They usually are pretty good at keeping track of their equipment. Usually, because they have noticed some hard drives are going down or are bad, they have already sent us drives to replace them. Tintri is one of the appliances that I barely needed to look at and maintain.

Although now we have SSD drives, during the time that I was using it, it was mostly physical drives. What I feel would be nice, in terms of a wishlist, is scalability. Rather than replacing the whole appliance, I would like to be able to just add another unit and scale it like that. I know there are some limitations to things like that, but scalability, as opposed to having to buy a new appliance for higher capacity, would be good.

Their tech support is above average.

Positive

We didn't have other storage, at that time, that was VM-ready, such as Pure Storage and others. What we mostly had was some sort of NFS storage. The storage that we were using was old and not really VM-centric. When we moved to Tintri, it provided the best solution for everything. 

We switched because of performance. Isilon wasn't really meant for VM.

It took three to four hours to get VMstore rack-mounted, installed, and starting to serve the virtual machines.

In terms of maintenance, I just rely on the notifications and check on it from time to time. It has been pretty self-reliant.

What I have heard, price-wise, is that Tinti was definitely very competitive. That's one of the reasons it was chosen for us.

We did play around with a little bit of vSAN, but that was a little bit more complicated and more expensive, considering the licensing.

For day-to-day use, VMstore has been solid VM storage for us.

We primarily use Tintri VMstore solution for our VM database storage needs. Previously we used IBM flash storage services. However, it had significant drawbacks. So, we switched to Tintri VMstore solution, and it met all our storage needs and more. 

The extra layer of security it provides is also very valuable for our organization. We use 24 VMs in our environment currently, and our customer database contains sensitive information. With the help of Tintri VMstore solution, we are also on the right path for future expansions.

Tintri VMstore solution brought a very positive change and impact on our day-to-day operations, and we have encountered little to no hiccups until now. 

As explained earlier, with all our physical and virtual infrastructure, the Tintri VMstore solution has been very helpful in managing our needs and provides easy integrations and extra layers of security. 

Overall, using Tintri VMstore solution, compared to the previously used alternatives, has given us far better output and services, and support over the period of its use.

The data encryption feature adds a valuable security enhancement with no impact on performance. The SecureVM feature of Tintri VMstore encrypts all data going through it with zero impact on performance or output and can be managed using the VMStore dashboard. 

This adds an additional layer of security to the organization's infrastructure and is a valuable additional feature. 

Since all the data we are processing is sensitive and a compromise cannot be afforded, using Tintri VMstore has benefited the organization thus far.

We need more options to integrate with cloud storage options other than the current AWS and IBM that it currently supports. We also use Microsoft Azure services for a portion of our database and would like to see the seamless integration of that platform with Tintri VMstore as well. 

Additionally, support ticket times could be reduced, and the method could be made a little more robust to save time and effort. 

The addition and improvement of these features can make Tintri VMstore stand out as the leading solution for VM storage and Database management.

I've used the solution for two years.

We have 300 virtual desktops running on VMware Horizon. While many VDI deployments (like call centers) are able to take advantage of non-persistent desktops, licensing and other application issues forced us to use more IO-intensive persistent desktops. The T650 allowed us to cost-efficiently provide very high performing desktops by optimizing the use of Flash. We're currently using 19 TB of storage space for the desktops, but their optimization has consistently given us a 100% flash-hit ratio.

For my company, Tintri's most valuable feature is it's TCO. This system is easy to install, requires no training, and is easy to upgrade. I've worked on both EMC and NetApp SANs, and this is by far the easiest system to maintain. As a SysAdmin, I really appreciate the built-in monitoring capabilities as well as the PowerShell and REST API toolkits.

I would love to see improvements in their replication engine. Their current replication is really just enough to "check the box" that they do replication. We'll probably implement Actifio, Zerto or EMC RecoverPoint for VMs for more critical data replication.

We've had no problems at all with stability. At this point, we've done several upgrades of the system which uses the High Availability features to restart each head during the upgrade.

We've had no issues with scalability.

Customer Service:

As I mentioned above, their level of customer service is extraordinary.

Technical Support:

Technical support has been very responsive. A few weeks ago we upgraded some switches at a remote site, causing the T650's management interface to go offline for a few minutes. Within a few minutes, we got a few emails from tech support and my sales engineer offering any help. They're also very good about keeping us informed about any new upgrades or patches.

This system was used for a new project.

Initial set-up was very easy and was probably finished in 30 minutes. I was surprised that the initial set-up required a keyboard, mouse and monitor rather than just a serial connection.

We purchased through a vendor called Datalink, but our Tintri sales engineer came in and installed the system at no additional cost.

With any SAN purchase, the sizing procedure is the most important step. I'd suggest going through exactly how you will use the system with your sales engineer and get their approval in writing.

We evaluated EMC, NetApp, Nimble Storage, and Pure Storage. At the time the "all-flash" options were still very expensive and we hoped that a hybrid approach would be sufficient for our performance needs. We're very happy with the decision.

With the drop in flash prices, there are a lot more options on the market than when we first started our research for this project. In particular, I'm currently very interested in hyper-converged solutions. However, if are looking for an easy, but high performing storage platform for VMware, then you can't go wrong with Tintri.

I use Tintri box for a VDI solution, hosting at least 1800 VDI stations there, deployment really easy, really good performance. No major issues.

It speeds up deployment significantly. This is one of the greatest improvements because we are able to deploy several virtual machines in seconds. The cloning feature on the Tintri Box is really impressive.

The deduplication feature in VDI environments. If Tintri say's: "we can host 3000 VMs in our storage", I know, we can host 3000 VMs there. Believe the results.

The area it needs to improve is the pricing. It could be better. Another topic is the replication feature, In the version 4.3 the syncronous replication is not so friendly and you have to do procedures manually to come back once you recover one of your nodes. 

One to three years.

Good. We had a couple of issues from the start and they were resolved very quickly with no impact on production.

In the past, we used a typical SAN solution. We made the switch because of the simplicity of the design. We can use the same network devices that have a large number of connections, instead of SAN switches. That's one less layer. And because the deployment is really really fast.

The initial setup is straightforward, no advanced knowledge is required to do it.

Explore the Tintri Synchronous Replication feature (licensing is required). This is a good solution to protect your environment at Storage Level and your RTO will be improved by this.

Yes, XtremIO and you can ask for a deployment test with Tintri, after you test it you will like it, his deployment Is really simple and faster. No other dashboard is needed because you can see the behavior of your storage and the IO performance at VM level.

You can ask for a deployment test with Tintri. After you test it you will like it, it's deployment is really quick and simple. No other dashboard is needed because you can see the behavior of your storage and the IO performance at the VM level.

We've been using Tintri for around six months now and we love the per-VM level statistics. It's also very easy to setup and to live with.

By using the Tintri management interface, we can now get VM-level statistics from both of our hypervisors. This allows us to quickly diagnose latency issues and find solutions for them before they become bigger problems.

Tintri hardware is perfectly sized for the medium-to-large office. Their interface and methodology is great, but it's a shame there is nothing for a robo office with 10-20 machines.

We've used it for six months.

We've had no issues with deploying Tintri. From start to finish it was less than 45 minutes with most of the time taken to get it into the rack.

We have performed failover testing before going live and experienced no issues.

We have also performed updates to Tintri during the day with no problems.

When Tintri gets to either the maximum performance reserves or available disk space, the only upgrade path is to purchase a new unit.

Customer service from Tintri is excellent. Our account manager is always available to talk to us and we have access to him and his expertise.

The technical support has been very helpful, even proactively replacing a piece of hardware with a known fault.

When we had to look at support renewal costs for our existing hardware vendor, they were very high which the prompted us to look into different hardware vendors.

The initial setup was very simple and it took 45 minutes to get fully up and running. Unboxing and racking took the longest.

We used in-house skills to get this working as it really doesn't require any expert knowledge compared to other storage vendors.

We plan to be using the Tintri system over 5 years, but we expect our ROI within 1-2 years based on lower admin overheads and quicker troubleshooting of issues.

To get the best pricing, work with Tintri and a vendor and they will be able to advise best on what they can offer.

Before we chose the Tintri storage system, we looked at a number of different companies, but many were removed from our selection process because of no NFS support which was our main focus.

Stop using LUNs and start working with Tintri. The simplicity will amaze you and takes the stress out of storage.

The SAN was purchased for our VDI environment. As soon as we put it in place, we noticed a threefold speed increase in the overall system.

It has greatly improved the performance of our VDI environment to start. Since the initial deployment we also attached it to our "Server VM" vsphere and even placed some of our virtual server workloads on it and it has handled that load very well.

The overall speed of the system is the main feature that is valuable for us. The metrics and analytics it provided is great also.

This product was purchased for our VMware View VDI environment . At the time we were having disk latency issues and were looking for an all Flash array. This is a Hybrid unit. At first we were skeptical it could provide the same performance as an all Flash Array, but when we tested it against one it did. So speed was our primary feature we were looking for and we certainly got. We also find the detail per-vm reporting at the ability to see reports from the hypervisor straight back to the storage useful. Another other nice feature is the vmware aware granular abilities to provide QOS to each VM.

On the physical side, I would suggest adding a light to each of the controllers that would indicate which is the active and with is the passive.

On the software side, I suggest adding integration with backups software like CommVault Simpana or Veeam where these products can integrate with the array and trigger things like snapshots for backup, etc. We are considering buying another to host more of our virtual server workload.

The unit has been very stable since it came on-line.

We currently only have one device, so have not scaled it.

Customer Service:

The customer service is excellent.

Technical Support:

The only time we ever had an issue was when we were converting our storage infrastructure from 10GB Base-T to 10GB fibre. We inserted the wrong style Gbic into t he unit and a port would not come up. Support called us before we even thought to call them.

We have an all Flash Equallogic unit and the Tintri is much faster. The Equallogic also does not de-dupe the data or have any other feature like the Tintri does.

The initial setup was very easy.

1. Rack the unit
2. Plug in power and network.
3. Assign an IP via the cli.
4. Login via a web interface and complete the set-up.
5. Load the needed module on each hyper-visor.
6. Mount the storage.

We implemented it ourselves.

The ROI is very good and will continue to grow as we scale our vdi

Compared to other products in the same area, it's cost effective. The price is the price and is reasonable for the class of storage. Licensing is not a factor as there are no additional license costs.

In addition to Tintri we also did a proof of concept on Pure Storage. While the Pure Storage was slightly faster it was 40% more expensive and provided 70% less useable storage.

We also met with SolidFire, NetApp, Dell, and HP.

A lot of people get spooked by the word hybrid. Don't be. This thing is a hybrid but has all-flash speed.

In our production environment, we have 10 ESX hosts with two replicated Tintri T850 SAN.

• It is fast and reliable. There hasn’t been a single failure in three years of use. 
• The VMs have worked fine, and the bandwidth to the Tintri SAN has never been an issue.

• Ease of managing and installing: It’s just to enter an IP address and you’re good to go. 
• It’s very good at IOPS. 
• The firmware upgrade is easy.

I would like it to have the ability to store data other than virtual machines. At the moment, you can only connect VMs to it, and that’s a bit disappointing.