Tintri VMstore T7000 Reviews

We've found that its VM-related features are very valuable: integration with hypervisor managers (VMware and RHEV-M), "VM awareness" within the storage, and visibility into the behaviors of each VM container and virtual disc. It has very hands-off, detailed visibility and control mechanisms for issues or questions of VM performance.

It's also very reliable and has an overall ease-of-use.

By providing a domain-specific, virtualized, storage solution, Tintri helps me -

• Move VM storage off general-purpose arrays and re-use that resource more appropriately; and
• Free up engineering resources to do more-useful work, versus managing and analyzing VM storage.

It needs current RHEV-M support (v2.5) which is slated for 2016. It also needs dedupe on the spinning media for the hybrid array. Change the UI to use something other than Adobe Flash.

We've used it for a little over three years.

It was one of the simplest install and deploys I've been involved with.

It's got reliable hardware plus seamless HA failover.

Scaling is via a loosely-coupled "cluster" of independent VM store appliances.

Excellent; the appliance does phone-home and auto-support uploads, so Tintri support knows when there are issues. On-site support (used once in 3+ years) was efficient and professional.

Excellent; I have direct contact and touch-based communication with my SE, and timely response with support for any question or issue we've had.

We switched to save cost, improve performance, free-up existing resources for other tasks, and to gain VMware and RHEV-M support.

It's super-simple. We were already an NFS-attached VM storage shop, so I just added the Tintri appliances as a data store, then live-migrated VM images to it. From opening the box to initial testing took 30 minutes.

I purchased from a VAR, but we did the install and integration ourselves, not for any lack of expertise from the VAR, but because the product is simple to install and deploy.

ROI is hard to quantify, but we gained visibility and optimization of the VM execution environment, freed up more-valuable resources (equipment and people) and improved reliability and stability of the VM execution environments.

Ask for discounts. Ask for "Tintri Global Center" as a free licence to go along with the VM appliances.

We considered NetApp, Nutanix, and HP 3PAR.

Try it, you'll like it.

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.

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.

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.

The feature I like the most is SyncVM. With a few clicks, you can restore a VM from an existing snapshot, and if you have Tintri OS 4, you can attach the snapshot as a attached disk to an existing VM!

The must have features are: Per VM QOS et Replication.
The new Scale Out option since TintriOS 4.2 is another feature and really useful when you have two VMStores and more. You don't have to manually balance VMs between VMstore, this feature do it for you!

VMStore does the job very well. I was a bit curious about how this box could perform like the big names, but after the POC, I was very impressed! It has simplicity, performance, and the best support team.

V.M...A.W.A.R.E. This is the new aspect we didn't have before. We have a lot of internal monitoring component to maintain good performances. With Tintri, the device does it by itself.

iSCSI could be a nice add-on. Dedupe is a nice to have! At this moment, compression does a very good job, but I'm sure dedupe could be the next big thing for VMStore.

I've used it for more than 1 year.

Yes, we got a faulty DIMM, but got it replaced the next business day.

VMStore is fully redundant. We tested all kinds of failures and the box is very stable. If you upgrade the firmware, you don't have to worry about downtime -- you don't have any! We also had some network problems but the HA did very well.

For now we don't have scalability issues, but It would be nice to add an external bay for additional storage space. If you need more space, you need to buy another full VMStore.

The support team is available 24/7. If your ticket is critical, you can pick up the phone and you have the right answer very quickly!

For any kind of problem, you can expect the right guy. You can escalate the problem very quickly if you need it. You don't have to talk to a thousand tech guys to get the right answer. Tintri support gave us the right facts and responded very quickly.

We used Hitachi VSP, but the support renewal is very costly. We got good feedback with the first contact with the Tintri sales team and we did a POC right after that!

The initial setup was really simple. You read the quick start manual and got a working solution in under one hour. No complicated setup at all!

We got the solution from a vendor team and they knew the box really well. We did a comparison in-house to be sure, and we don't regret this step.

At this moment, the ROI is really good for us. We bought additional VMStores in the first year for additional storage space and DR site. We are looking to add more and more in the following year.

You pay for what you get. You will have the performance you need and you will not be disappointed at all! About licensing, you get the essential options for the smaller price. Some killer add-ons are available, but it's all your choice.

We looked at Tegile because they offer multiple protocols (iSCSI, NFS, SMB, etc.), but their replication process is very disappointing. Tintri is the best for a VMWare solution and its simplicity is a must!

Tintri has the best solution in the storage world. Virtualization and storage is a good match and they are always adding new stuff with each new firmware release. I don't hesitate to recommend Tintri to my friends!

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.

When implementing our VDI environment we noticed that we were unable to push out the IOPS for the VDI's to achieve the performance we wanted to. With Tintri we are able to deliver good performing VDI desktops.

The fact that it is very easy to set up and delivers. It is a set and forget environment with a very good tooling to view performance and delivers the IOPS we need for our VDI environment.

Speed of our VDI machines. We have a very high log in and log out ratio and machines are being refreshed instantly so we have a constant boot storm on our storage. Tintri can easily put up the effort then run this smoothly.

Not until now.

Not until now. Because we don't have a full flash array but a hybrid we expected to not have a 100% flash hit ratio but to this day we never got below 100% hit ratio of Flash.

Customer Service:

Perfect. Normally they are aware of an issue earlier than we are. And even if they don't support something they still put in the effort to help us

Technical Support:

Very high.

Yes, we used diferent kinds of storages but they were unable to deliver the IOPS we needed.

Straightforward. As said, within 45 minutes from unboxing to production.

Through a vendor team. Other than getting the Tintri out of the box it was very easy.

Speed of our VDI machines. We have a very high log in and log out ratio and machines are being refreshed instantly so we have a constant boot storm on our storage.

Yes, we tried multiple storage vendors but at that time Tintri was our best option for what we needed to achieve. They also provided us with a demo model.

I'd say if you are going for VDI environments or need to provide high end VMWare solutions make sure to try Tintri. If you tried it and used it you wont go back to anything else.