Tintri VMstore T7000 Reviews

Tintri T5060 SSD array used for high performance requirements of Windows 10 VDI environment using Citrix XenDesktop.

KPI: Performance must be equal to or better than a local user environment.

The Tintri VMstore was faster than most local user laptops and desktops available at the time. Most users were on spinning disk or hybrid storage. 

In the VDI environment, the "VM-aware" T5060, along with its extremely fast speeds, has removed storage as your typical bottleneck.

• Its VM-aware features have been excellent to use and integrate with XenServer as well. 
• Its speed has been absolutely fantastic. 
• Upgrades are super easy and can be done during business hours without interruptions in production.

• I would love more insight into each virtual machine statistic. 
• The Tintri Analytics site is excellent for long-term trending, but more data would be great.

No issues.

No issues.

Technical support has been excellent, Their engineers are excellent and easy to access.

No previous solution was used.

Initial setup was very straightforward.

Implementation was done in-house.

ROI is excellent, but have no specific data.

Ensure the storage system "natively" supports the protocols that you wish to use (i.e., CIFS) without the need for the overhead of internal "conversion VMs" that run the protocols.

We evaluated Pure Storage SSD arrays.

Tintri has been a breeze to deal with!  We have had no issues.

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!

• The performance graphs, which allow us to see real-time IOPs.
• Latency at the virtual machine (VM) level.

We can now identify VMs which require a lot of disk performance from a single console. It has also allowed us to give our developers access to disk IOPS that were not previously possible, reducing both migration times and job run times.

The Hyper-V configuration is not as easy as VMware. Documentation could be better as well. The replication technology is good, but could be improved to allow the powering on of the replica instead of having to clone the machine.

I have used it for three years.

We had no issues with the deployment.

We had to replace a chassis because of a bad fan connector.

We filled up the performance quota before filling up the space.

Customer service is excellent.

Technical support is excellent.

We used Atlantis ILIO. We switched because Tintri gave us similar speed at a good price point on physical disks as opposed to the Atlantis approach of using memory for the disks. We also got a lot more insight into VM behavior.

It is straightforward. Plug it into the power and network, give it an IP address, add the vCenters, then add the storage to VMware.

We did it in-house.

We have not calculated this. It is a difficult one to calculate as well, as it has saved man hours for both support and developers in troubleshooting storage I/O issues. It has also allowed us to actually complete upgrades that were failing on our traditional storage arrays because of time-outs when accessing the disk. So without Tintri, we would not have been able to perform these upgrades.

Pricing is very competitive, so you get a lot of bang for your buck. At the price point, the restriction to a specific TB size per unit can be forgiven.

The VM replicate license is not worth getting.

We compared it to Atlantis ILIO, which we were currently running.

Make sure you have four 10GB ports available, as each controller has two ports. If they are both filled, it will flash the error LED on the front of the unit.

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.

The ease of administration is crazy good. The dashboard makes things so easy to understand that you have a full grasp on what your VMs are doing and where the bottlenecks are. The speed that you are able to achieve from this storage is better than what we have seen from any other vendor.

We are able to perform maintenance on all our VMs at the same time, backup multiple VMs at the same time, etc. without causing lag to our users.

Of course, a lower price would always be welcome. We were one of the first hyper-v adopters, so it was a bit more cumbersome for the initial setup, but the new OS has resolved these issues.

We've used it for one year.

We had problems with performing backups straight from the Tintri when using Hyper-V as the hypervisor, but the fix is due 2nd quarter of 2016 and their support was great to work with.

The Tintri platform is rock solid. The increase in stability has been the major reason that we are so pleased with Tintri.

Scalability is not really an issue. When you run out of space, you just purchase another unit and create a new share.

When we had backup issues, their support was great and we had actual engineers call us back and work through the problem with us.

If you have an issue, Tintri gets the right people on the call to get the problems fixed. You don't waste time getting transferred all over the place.

We used NetApp and had nothing but problems with slow speeds, with stability, with needing to hire consultants for management and upgrades. It was an expensive solution that didn't deliver.

Tintri is probably the easiest SAN that you will ever encounter. 15 minutes and you are up and running. You need very limited information, and the setup poster gave any information to get you going.

There was no need for vendor help or consultants. The setup takes 15 minutes and is extremely straightforward.

We are able to fully patch our servers and run more VMs without having to purchase additional storage. Our ROI after switching to Tintri and Hyper-V is in the $40-$60K range.

Tintri is going to be a cheaper option that some others, but that doesn't mean you lose anything. It was built from the ground up to host VMs, and isn't an older solution retrofitted to work with VMs.

We looked at upgrades to our Netapp, or going with an HP or EMC SAN. Neither was able to deliver what we got from Tintri.

Hands down one of the best investments that we have ever done. We loved it so much we bought a second one for another site a couple of months later, and now we are buying a third.

The ease of use is the most valuable feature. You just set up the VMstore in 15 minutes or less by connecting the network, giving a name and IP, and then adding DNS entries and permissions and you are off an running.

The storage is VMware, so it knows how to optimize performance for VMs, which is what we use exclusively in our modern data center. We never hit drive performance problems. Our headaches are gone after the switch!

Of course price can always be lower. Still working with support to enable more options for backup at this time, but we asked for features and they expect to deliver in the next month or two...nice to have a company that listens.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We haven't had any issues with stability.

We haven't had scalability issues.

They've listened to us when we requested more options for backup.

The price could be lower.

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. :)