Tintri Increases Storage Performance of University of California Irvine

Tintri Inc., a producer of VM-aware storage (VAS) for virtualization and cloud environments, announced that University of California Irvine (UCI) is using Tintri to manage all virtualized workloads for its Office of Information Technology (OIT).

UCI – a public research university with more than 30,000 students, 1,100 faculty and 9,000 staff – had been relying on out of date storage arrays, which were unable to pinpoint which VMs were causing slowdowns, making it impossible to diagnose performance problems they experienced. In addition, upgrades were complicated and required UCI to frequent downtime, which disrupted operations.

“The legacy system was very complicated,” said John Ward, IT enterprise architect, UCI. “There were far too many knobs to turn and a lot of pitfalls if we did it wrong. We were also having speed issues. The combination of these issues prompted us to look for a new solution.“

The UCI team conducted an evaluation of potential vendors for the infrastructure upgrade. They looked closely at many storage vendors by sending a very long survey with 92 questions to the finalists.

“Tintri was the clear winner after reviewing all of the responses,” Ward said. “Tintri has the best built-in analytics. We can detect performance issues by getting data from the VMware vCenter ESX hosts. It reports on every VM as well as at the VMDK level. And with Tintri, we can add encryption at any time. With some other solutions, you have to buy self-encrypting disks upfront. It’s great to be able to add encryption later if our business needs change.“

After deploying Tintri’s VMstore T880 system, UCI improved its storage performance with better visibility into VM performance and simplified storage management. Instead of having to spend countless hours identifying the source of system slowdowns, Tintri Global Center allows UCI to identify the source of a problem with as little as three clicks.

Upgrading to Tintri’s VM-aware storage system had benefits including:

• Eliminating the need to schedule downtime for software upgrades (they now happen without disruption)
• Allowing snapshots, cloning and replication on a per-VM basis, avoiding the need to create and manage extra volumes and datastores
• Providing a global view of its infrastructure with fast, easy troubleshooting
  

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