New Tintri Software for Its VM-Aware Storage Appliance

Tintri, Inc. announced a software update to its product VMstore that simplifies the process of deploying and managing storage for virtual environments.

New capabilities include advanced cloning, which reduces complexity of VM provisioning, and integration with VMware infrastructure, which allows IT managers to access VMstore features from VMware management tools.

"As the benefits of virtualization become widely understood, IT organizations are highly motivated to find solutions to help them accelerate virtualization," said Kieran Harty, Tintri CEO. "Today’s announcement builds on Tintri’s foundation of intelligent, VM-aware storage; there’s long been a demand for a modern alternative to the clunky cloning features currently offered by legacy storage vendors. These updates offer just that to IT operations teams, allowing them to test and roll out new applications much faster."

The software update includes the following capabilities:

• Advanced Cloning Functionality: Enables IT administrators to improve efficiency of VM provisioning. IT operations teams can now create hundreds of clones to support VDI, instant provisioning, and test and development environments in minutes instead of hours.
• Integration with VMware Management Tools via VAAI: Support for vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) with vSphere which provides integration with VMware management tools. IT operations teams can initiate cloning seamlessly from VMware vCenter or VMware vCloud Director to create space and performance efficient clones on VMstore appliances. This approach reduces provisioning time and complexity.
• Multi-vCenter Support: Allows a single VMstore appliance to support multiple vCenter servers used for different use cases such as VDI and server infrastructure.

"The culmination of features in Tintri’s new release will completely change the way you look at storage for virtual environments," said Ryan Makamson, systems administrator for the College of Engineering and Architecture at Washington State University. "With the VAAI plug-in, you can clone VMs in an instant; this will make provisioning of all of our VMs, VDI, and infrastructure alike – which makes everything much simpler and faster. The only downside is that I won’t have time to refill my coffee while I wait for the cloning process to run."

The update to VMstore is available to customers through an early access program and will be available in summer 2012.