Managed Cloud Solution Provider in Amsterdam, Denit Upgrades to Tintri

Industry:

Managed cloud solution provider

Geography:

The Netherlands

Virtualization Environment:

vSphere
VMware vCloud Director for Service Providers

Key Challenges:

Existing storage was unable to provide the performance required for virtualization
Existing storage solution was end of life
Latency for virtualized database related workloads needed to be lower and consistent
Effective cost per gigabyte needed to be lowered at consistent SSD performance

Primary Use Case:

Storage for virtualized infrastructure

Business benefits:

Enhanced visibility of performance issues
Minimal administration required
No requirement for external consultants
Better utilization of storage resources

IT Challenges
Denit Internet Services B.V. is a managed cloud solution provider based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and has been supplying and managing reliable and secure cloud solutions since 1999.

The company’s team of more than 60 specialists design, build and manage custom cloud solutions that contribute to the online success of its customers. Denit is committed to delivering the best services available and utilizes the latest technology in order to achieve satisfied customers.

The company focuses on ISVs. It provides a range of tailor made solutions and services, including managed hosting, private, hybrid and public cloud solutions, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and managed security. With twin data centers in The Netherlands and Germany, each backed by full redundant Denit owned stretched network rings spread over three physical data center locations, The firm guarantees 99,999% uptime to customers using its certified designs utilizing the twin data center stretched infrastructure.

However, Denit was struggling to reach the desired performance for its VMs with its existing storage environment. It required a high level of administration, configuration and skills to support the VMs. Denit frequently had to resort to paying for consultancy services to administer and manage the storage systems. In addition, the systems did not provide visibility at a VM level which made identifying performance issues and root cause analyses a challenge.

Solution
Denit was under pressure to find a storage solution that could support its virtualized infrastructure. After considering a number of options, including NetApp, Nimble, EMC XtremIO, EMC ScaleIO, Hedvig, Nutanix, VMware VSAN and Pure Storage, the company opted for Tintri, Inc.. It purchased two Tintri solutions to provide the storage requirements for part of its existing workloads and the company immediately experienced the benefits with installation taking less than an hour.

The major reason for choosing Tintri was the ability to provide visibility into performance breakdown at the VM-level.

“Performance visibility at the VM-level is a key factor with Tintri. It helps to give an insight into the performance of VMs and you can pinpoint where an issue is. If there is an issue with a VM, you can just drill down and find it,” commented Daniël Van Wijnen CTO, Denit. “With other storage systems, it can be hard to identify the cause of performance issues. With Tintri, we can see if a VM, but more importantly which VM, is taking up a lot of resources or more than it’s supposed to in a matter of seconds. Tintri gives you real-time insight into VM behavior at the storage level.“

Another significant benefit was the huge improvement in latency rates provided by the Tintri appliances.

“Tintri guarantees that there was no latency impact even with 95% utilization and only a little bit with 100% utilization, which meant we could use all the storage we were purchasing,” Van Wijnen says. “That was one of the real decision-making factors for us to go with Tintri.“

Van Wijnen is impressed with the performance of the Tintri appliances.

“Tintri’s performance and ease of administration has been beyond what was expected,” he says. “I would highly recommend it to other people looking for VMware optimized storage solutions.“

Results:

Performance and visibility
Tintri has delivered a storage environment that provides the performance and visibility required to support Denit’s virtualized infrastructure. Any performance issues can be identified because Tintri provides visibility at the VM-level. This helps to provide insight into the performance of VMs and to pin-point where an issue could be and do it quickly.

“Increased insight into performance on a per VM-level is a big gain. With Tintri, it can take as little as tens to find the cause. Often, you will find that the issue is within the VM and not within the storage,” Van Wijnen says. “Rival systems do not provide this level of visibility.”

Improved utilization of storage resources
Compared to other storage solutions which frequently suffer from latency issues when they reach 70% of capacity or less, Denit can get more performance and value from its Tintri appliances because they can achieve up to 95% capacity with little or no latency. Even at 100%, latency is noticeable but not extreme, so Denit is able to use all the storage it purchases.

Better management
Storage management has been almost completely automated, with savings in time and staff costs. The previous systems required significant administration and configuration resources, often forcing Denit to hire consultants to handle the work.

“We don’t need to hire anybody now,” Van Wijnen says. “We can fully manage everything ourselves. The Tintri appliances just work and operate on their own. They run themselves.“

Ease of installation
In addition to the simplicity of management and reliability, the Tintri appliances are also easy to install. Denit took less than an hour to get the appliances up and running.

Moving forward
After this initial interview took place Denit has further invested in four additional Tintri units and intends to further expand the use of Tintri within its operations as needed. Aside from being used as storage solution for cloud infrastructure, Denit is due to start using Tintri as the preferred solution for private cloud silos.