Former EVP Engineering of VMware Launches Tintri
Start-up in VMware storage appliance getting $17 million investment
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on March 30, 2011 at 3:05 pmTintri, Inc., developer of a purpose-built storage system for virtual machines, announced Tintri VMstore, a product specifically designed from the ground up to solve the unique storage problems of virtual machines (VMs).
Tintri’s first product, VMstore, is a storage system that allows enterprises to overcome costly problems associated with the scale or performance of virtual infrastructure.
Tintri is also announcing nearly $17 million in Series A and Series B venture funding led by NEA and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Tintri’s co-founder and CEO is Dr. Kieran Harty, who earned his PhD at Stanford University and led all desktop and server research and product development at VMware from 1999 through 2006. "Tintri was founded to develop products needed by enterprises for the next generation of virtualization deployments," said Harty. "The key bottleneck slowing virtualization adoption is the legacy storage systems that were architected before virtualization was even a consideration. Our products are designed to help enterprises virtualize 80 percent or more of their IT infrastructure."
Tintri VMstore allows enterprises to virtualize many different kinds of mission-critical applications such as Oracle Financials and Microsoft Exchange that previously could only run on standalone systems with legacy direct-attached or SAN storage.
"Previous attempts to virtualize our Oracle Financials application had failed – as we couldn’t deliver the performance users required," said Don St. Onge, CIO, TIBCO Software, Inc. "With Tintri VMstore, we saw a 2X performance boost which was more than enough to keep our users happy. Tintri’s unique approach to deduplication and compression lets us run the entire 1TB database instance in only 177GB of flash memory."
Tintri VMstore is in production use helping enterprises manage and store virtual machines at a range of companies in global electronics, mobile games, geo-informatics, technology, higher education and more.
In most enterprises today, less than 30 percent of their IT infrastructure is virtualized. While some companies have expanded beyond this, they continue to face significant challenges of cost, complexity and performance with existing storage solutions. By some estimates, storage now accounts for more than 20 percent of typical enterprise IT budgets and up to 60 percent of virtualization budgets.
"Enterprise IT departments are running into big roadblocks getting virtualization deployed on a large scale," said Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "While virtualization offers undisputed advantages on the server side, it actually exposes the complexity and cost of storage. To break the cycle of pain, ‘virtual specific’ storage will ultimately be required. Tintri’s VMstore is a unique, new approach to solving this problem, and should find a welcome audience."
Tintri brought together a research and development team drawing on industry-leading experts from Citrix, EMC/Data Domain, Google, NetApp, Sun Microsystems and VMware and others to build the world’s first VM-aware storage system, VMstore.
VMstore includes many significant features to optimize performance and to simplify the management of VM storage at scale, including:
- VM-aware file system designed to service I/O workloads from VMs;
- Seamless flash/disk integration with file system for smooth workload transitions and efficient use of flash capacity;
- Monitoring, control and reporting features on a per-VM and per-virtual disk basis for greater transparency in managing storage for VMs;
- Hybrid flash/disk appliances with inline deduplication and compression capabilities.
Tintri VMstore also eliminates most of the cost and complexity of managing storage systems in a virtualized environment. Central to Tintri’s value proposition is the idea that storage should be interchangeable, powerful nodes that allow users to move VMs from one to another as needed. This gives VM administrators greater visibility into their network and control of their storage. Each storage node is presented as a single datastore to the VM administrator.
"Storage provisioning for our VMs was complex and required a lot of ongoing manual effort," said Jeff Solomon, virtual infrastructure manager, Loyola Marymount University. "Tintri makes provisioning and managing storage for VMs much more efficient – it takes minutes instead of hours. What’s more, I can see throughput, IOPS and latency for each VM. With Tintri VMstore, I can provision or change VMs on the fly and never have to worry about carving another slice out of the array."
In addition to management simplicity benefits and operations expense savings, organizations running their VM storage on Tintri VMstore are seeing performance that exceeds standalone systems with direct-attached storage.
"We used to run our build VMs on a high-performance SAN," said John Welter, vice president of technology at North West Group, provider of digital remote sensing, digital aerial photography, LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) and related services in North America and the international market. "The builds now run twice as fast at less than half the cost with Tintri VMstore. We’re also virtualizing our production PostGIS databases and seeing comparable or better performance. With Tintri, we can finally end the LUN-acy."
Comments
Storage for virtualization machines is attracting a lot of companies with hardware and software products, start-ups like NexGen Storage, Nexus, Pancetera, PHD, Seanodes, VirtualSharp, Virsto, VM6, etc., or more older DataCore, Veeam, etc.
Comes Tintri, a 35-employee company based in Mountain View, CA and launched by a team who knows the subject particularly one of the founder, CEO Irishman Kieran Harty, previously EVP of R&D at VMware for seven years. The other founder is Mark Gritter, architect, formerly staff engineer at Sun that he joined through the acquisition of Kealia in 2004. Four other executives come from Data Domain: Pratik Wadher, VP engineering, that worked at Mendocino and Veritas; Vincent Guan, architect, that was also at Brocade; Edward Lee, another architect in the start-up, seen at Zambeel and Compaq Systems Research Center with a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in Computer Science, where he was an original member of the famous Berkeley RAID pioneering team; and the fourth one being Rex Walters, VP customer engineering, at 3Par, NetApp, ONStor and Mirapoint before joining Data Domain. VP marketing Chris Bennett was at NetApp for ten years.
In stealth mode for two-and-a-half years, Trinti officially reveals its product to be available next week, a 'VM-aware storage' system, with the unique focus to provide storage for VMs as traditional networked storage products are poor solutions for large-scale virtualization projects.
"Tintri VMstore operates directly at the virtual machine and disk level", wrote Kieran in a blog. The company adds:" VMstore file system is designed from the ground-up for VMs. It uses virtual machine abstractions - VMs and virtual disks - in place of conventional storage abstractions such as volumes, LUNs, or files. Each I/O request - reads, writes, or metadata operations - map directly to the particular virtual disk on which it occurs. VMstore directly monitors and controls I/O performance for each virtual disk. It communicates with the VMware vCenter Server API to learn which virtual machines are active and reside on Tintri storage. VMstore collects and reports per-VM and per-virtual disk statistics, such as size, I/O throughput, and resource utilization."
This software, supporting VMware vSphere 4.x, is embedded into an appliance named Trinti VMstore T440 ($65,000), a 19-inch 4U rack with 8.5TB of usable capacity on nine 160GB MLC SSDs supplemented by fifteen SATA 1TB HDDs in RAID-6 and dual GbE ports (10GbE in option), with de-duple and compression capabilities.
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