Tintri VMstore T7000 Reviews

There's virtually no management required. There's also no disc latency with each VM having its own I/O lane.

It's reduced disc latencies in our ERP system from 300-400ms to nanoseconds. It's also freed up daily management requirements for old SAN management.

Replication between two VMs needs to be improved to real-time. The solution also needs to have a better licensing model.

We've used it for one year.

We've encountered no issues with deployment.

It's been stable for us.

We've been able to scale it without issue.

The customer service is good.

The level of technical support is excellent.

We previously used Dell Equilogic. It was a continuous management headache with very high latency. Tintri is much easier to manage -- there's virtually none -- and the latency is only in the nanoseconds.

The initial setup was easy. This tool took longer to mount in-rack than to have it ready to start moving VMs to it. It was a very easy configuration.

The implementation was done in-house.

Price is reasonable considering performance and time saved in managing.

• Nimble
• Pure Storage
• Storage Craft
• DataCore
• EMC
• SCALE

Get it. You won’t be disappointed.

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.

Flash utilization - disk latencies are dropped from 15 - 400ms for our ERP software to 1ns!

Management interface - gives visualization into each VM, making it very easy to pinpoint a problem in the environment.

Automated support - we had a power supply fail and it automatically opened a support ticket, a new power supply arrived the next morning, and, upon replacing the power supply, the ticket automatically closed.

The end users have noticed a vast improvement in performance with our ERP solution. VDI performance is excellent too, helping us in getting the users to adopt VDI.

For IT - we no longer have to worry about carving LUNs and hunting down latencies. We don't have to worry about storage any more and have time to focus on other initiatives.

Reduce the weight of the box so it's not such a bear to install in the rack. (More of a joke because I can't think of any improvements that can be made for performance and to the management interface.)

8 months

It took us longer to mount the T620 in the rack than it did to setup and deploy.

None

None

Excellent

Excellent

Dell Equalogic, EMC

EMC was at end of life and support costs were going through the roof. Equalogic performance was failing to meet our needs.

Very easy. It took longer to mount it in the rack than it took to setup.

In-house

We looked at Nimble, Scale, EMC, Nutanix, Equalogic. Software solutions: Infinio, DataCore, Conducive

Tintri has been an excellent choice for us and the performance has gone way beyond our expectations. We are very pleased with Tintri and highly recommend it.

Speed - the hybrid flash has low latency even at high bandwidth.

Performance Metrics - the ability to see which VM is having issues in now only 3 clicks away.

Since our purchase Tintri has added QoS. While that works great the vmstores are so good at eliminating noisy neighbor issues we have not had to use it.

I would like to see better integration of the Tintri features directly into vSphere. Some of this is an extensibility issue in vSphere. They need to keep improving single pane of glass management across many Tintri units and not just monitoring of all units. They are making progress on both of these issues.

9 months

We do not get the expected data compression ratios. This has been true for all data-dupe/compression technologies.

No. I can perform OS upgrades during the day. The active-passive architecture switches so fast the upgrade causes no issues.

Scalability is just an add-more proposition. It is easy and the units come essentially in small, medium, and large.

They have been very responsive to all questions and tickets.

They have been responsive and helpful.

We were using NetApp FAS3240. They are older models and too slow. Their OnCommand Balance product never lived up to expected monitoring.

Setup is easy. The storage is only for virtualization so it is ready to go. Add some basic configuration information, add the datastore, move VMs. No knobs to turn to tune it in.

We implemented this in house. One shouldn't need a team to setup a Tintri.

How do you value a trouble free solution that works and provides metrics you cannot get anywhere else?

It is nice that we can add encryption later if we need it. It is so common to need encrypting disks with initial purchase to get this feature.

Get a POC. The time it takes to setup and test is so minimal.

Deployment of new servers is now very fast; just clone master images to deploy a new server in seconds. It will be automatically mapped into Hyper-V. Just start, and it's... done.

• VM-aware processing
• Speed
• Easy management
• Fast deployment for virtual machines

• Active/active cluster between two Tintris on Hyper-V cluster.
• Dedup should be better.

It runs very good. Software upgrades can made during office hours.

At the moment, it is half-filled with SSDs; it has have 25 TB in SSD capacity (12.6 TBof it is usable) and after dedupe/compression, 80 TB is usable.

Customer Service:

I rate the level of customer service as five stars; very fast and helpful. They also found a firmware error on our switch! Perfect.

Technical Support:

I rate the level of technical support as five stars.

Before, we used a NetApp FAS 2552. It was very slow and not so good to manage. It caused performance Issues. Then, we had a PoC with the Tintri 880 Series. It was much faster than the NetApp. After the PoC, we bought an all-flash 5060. It is very fast.

As an example a virtual machine needs 25-30 seconds to boot with NetApp; with the Tintri, it takes 1-2 seconds.

We have storage latency from 0.60 ms.

The setup was easy. We had the Tintri up and running in 60 mins with everything.

It took more time just to rack and cable the Netapp...

We implemented it in-house with support from Tintri.

Prices are not cheap, but it runs...

Before choosing, we also evaluated a NetApp all-flash system but Tintri does it better, the PoC was faster; better management.

Try it, love it. :)

Our old storage platform was on ageing hardware and the performance in our environment was declining. We purchased the Tintri VMstore to increase performance in our virtualised  environment.

Tintri VMstore has improved my organization by providing a huge performance increase, mostly to our Citrix XenApp environment. Our users have not complained about slow downs while using or opening apps since we got VMstore.

The feature that I find most valuable is the VM level awareness that the VMstore gives you. This is great for finding problems where VMs are hogging all the performance. 

The VMstore is also very stable. I have not had a single issue since the purchase my company made.

The product could be improved by adding iSCSI support, as others have mentioned. We have had to rethink how we implement some of our services due to this.

Less than one year.

Tintri VMstore is rock solid. We have not had a single issue with it. It is also very low maintenance allowing us to concentrate on project work.

We have not had any issues with this. Currently, we only have one VMstore.

Support from our vendor and Tintri are brilliant. They have always answered all of our questions promptly.

We previously used a NetApp SAN which was ageing and not performing, so we needed a new device. Tintri was recommended by our third-party.

The setup is very straightforward. We were setup in no time and ready to start migrating VMs onto the device.

We implemented this solution through our vendor. They recommended this solution and had a high level of expertise.

Tintri is reasonably priced for the solution you get. Advanced features do require extra to use. 

We did not evaluate other options.

Tintri is the best solution that I have used. The performance is second to none!

From a PoC standpoint, both the hybrid and all-flash boxes delivered a performance boost up to twice the performance in comparison with what was there in production: First Generation VNX, NetApp FAS 6000.

The most valuable features are VM awareness and QoS policies. While VAAI and VASA set the stage for arrays to be intelligent from a virtualization perspective, Tintri has taken it a step beyond.

You can control resources on a per VM basis to ensure that contention in resources does not hamper performance.

On a related note, the advent of VVol (which Tintri supports) will be interesting to watch. While VVol is gaining acceptance and can be seen adding similar capabilities to legacy arrays, Tintri does integrate and leverages VASA/VVol.

The product offers a number of features apart from the standard set found on most arrays (snapshots, replication, etc.). This includes inline deduplication and compression, which are now almost standard.

The single discerning feature in which the vendor has been an absolute pioneer is VM awareness and the ability to set QoS on a per-VM basis. While this is available in other products such as SolidFire, EMC SPBM (storage policy based management), Tintri is the pioneer.

I think with the world soon becoming only SSD, possibly NVMe, and 3D Xpoint. It would make sense for Tintri to drop the hybrid array down the line. The storage market is becoming cluttered.

There were no issues in terms of stability. But in terms of performance, with the hybrid box, when the IOmeter was set to literally bombard the box, there was an increase in latency which we managed to address with policies. So in short, the box is highly configurable.

There were no issues with scalability. While we didn’t have the need to add shelves, that should be a straightforward process

The support we had during the PoC was good.

The initial setup was absolutely straightforward. We found Tintri more than ready to support us during the installation.

Treat this no differently than any other standard array. Decide on the functionality suite. The licensing model is relatively simple. For things like replication, however, the licensing needs to be looked at.

We evaluated Pure Storage and XtremIO.

Understand your workloads and their demands well. This means you need VM performance metrics for at least three to six months, ideally, from vRealize Operations. Setting up policies is crucial as it has direct implications.