Tintri Combines Forces With US Army Joint Systems to Train Drone Pilots

Tintri Inc. announced that the US Army Joint Systems Integration Lab (JSIL) is increasing user satisfaction and improving performance by using Tintri’s VM-aware storage to manage all virtualized workloads in its unmanned aircraft training systems division.

The JSIL is the IT center responsible for testing, developing and maintaining the software and hardware for the Army’s drone and missile programs. Previously, it had been using NetApp, Inc.‘s arrays to store the lab’s database imagery and drone software source code. But slowdowns due to disk I/O caused VMs to struggle through testing exercises.

After running a series of tests on a Tintri T820 demo unit, the JSIL was ready to move mission critical workloads away from NetApp and onto Tintri. Shortly after migrating virtual workloads, the JSIL noticed improvement in application performance, with a 220% speed increase in its disk I/O and 100% improvements on all other tests.

“I liked the fact that Tintri specifically designed for virtualized environments,” explained Rory Hamaker, lead systems administrator and infrastructure architect, Ameritech/SED, a civilian contractor agency that provides IT services to the JSIL labs. “And since it’s a hybrid storage platform, I knew the systems could provide the speed as well as the capacity we needed for our VMware environment.“

User productivity and satisfaction also skyrocketed.

“We used to get 15 to 20 trouble tickets each week from end users complaining about application performance,” noted Hamaker. “Their VMs were locking up and not enabling them to connect to training modules. Since moving everything over to Tintri, I haven’t received a single trouble ticket or user complaint about system performance. In IT support, no news is good news. I have been trying to think of something I could suggest to Tintri to improve the storage systems, but Tintri has already thought of everything!“

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