I had to stay away from technology after being overwhelmed at VMworld last week. Now that I am back to senses, I had to point out the coolest tool that I saw at VMworld. Tintri blew me away from the get go. They were very professional all along the process. They contacted me before the conference to setup an appointment and scheduled demo for me while I was there. This one was important as Duncan himself spoke very highly of the product. I was in for a surprise. Not really being a storage guy myself, I thought stuff will simply fly over my head.
Once the demo began, I could feel my eyeball growing in size almost to a size of a golfball. I had so many ahh haa moments during the demo. I will not try to explain everything that it does as there website does a pretty decent job in explaining what it has to offer. But in a nutshell, Tintri offers a NFS solution that is a mix of SATA and SSD. So whats really awesome about that? What makes Tintri really great is its manageability and the fact that its VM aware and would pretty much be useless for anything else. Yes, each I/O request maps directly to the virtual disk. Whats even better is that management of storage. It has a very simple user interface that enables you to see exactly whats happening on your storage side. You can look at capacity, latency all that good stuff without being a conventional storage admin.
From the performance side, one thing I liked was the mix of SATA and SSD which means only active data is kept in flash. Think swap! Now I know cache to host or swap to SSD in vSphere 5 will enable you to swap on SSD and what not. But that setup is based on having your swap files on a SSD and preferably locally on the host, you could also have an SSD LUN. But thats another aspect that has to be managed. With Tintri, you will just format your datastore, create your VMs and the appliance will decide when to use flash on its own. It is fool proof indeed. You can also pin files to flash if you always want certain files to run on flash, but I would think the algorithm in the appliance will probably make a smarter decision unless you have a very specific need. Perhaps, you are trying to please your CTO and want to make sure his/her VM is always lightening fast.
As much as I loved the product there are a few things that I think its missing. As of today, it does not have replication, however, that will happen very shortly from what I was told. Also, you can’t expand your datastore to span across multiple Tintri appliances, but maybe I am still thinking in the traditional way. Perhaps if your goal is to have multiple SLAs, there are possible plans for having Tintri appliances with different configurations to support that. All in all, I think its definitely a product worth looking at. It, has all the redundancies built in like one would expect and I can only expect it to get better with time. The user interface and simple manageability was the big thing for me. If you are looking for an NFS solution for a virtual environment, Tintri is not a product that should be ignored. Sooner or later you will end up playing with it. Start looking at it sooner to stay ahead. 
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[...] was delightful seeing reactions to the VM-aware features and intuitive UI. Blogger and vExpert Bilal Hashmi’s comment on his blog was typical of the interactions with [...]
I was a big follower too until this device lost all of my data. They have some data integrity issues they need to solve first before I would feel safe using this device again. Their support sucks since it’s always a guy by the name of Frank on the phone, the poor guy must be working 247.
Wow, thats def not good to hear. I pointed out replication as well because to me I have an OCD for that. I do have a few very good people in my contact that maybe able to put you through someone above Frank (no promises, just hoping), let me know if you are still interested or if you have completely given up on the device. As best practice, backup backup backup. But I know how you feel, I would be pretty mad as well if my storage device crapped out on me and if I didn’t get the support I needed, let me know.
After a 72 hour outage, it would be hard to convince my CTO.
Well, the way I see it is that we spend millions of dollars on spaceships that are never ever to take off. So not all products are designed to fail, however we do have some anomalies where at times things do get out of control.This is why diversifying is always a good thing which could be something to consider. That also means the overhead of keeping up with two diff tools/vendors and what not. But I see your side as well, 72 hrs of outage is not a small one by any means. All the usability can go to hell if one can’t get proper support. If you do change your mind, let me know and I will see if I can get you in touch with someone above Frank (again no promises I can only try). Good luck to you. Just curious what device did you replace tintri with?
We tried Pure storage. Sure they’re another startup, but they have a lot of people at the company that really understand Enterprise
I see.. I am always curious to see what people are using etc. I don’t know a whole lot about them but I have heard of them. One more thing I will have to learn a little bit about now. Thanks
CaptainCanucks,
My name is Peter Esters and I’m the Director of Technical Support for Tintri. I welcome the opportunity to speak with you and listen to your feedback. During our conversation I’d like to discuss our 24×7 support and global coverage. I’d also like to get a few more details from you regarding your previous statements. I have been unable to find any examples of data loss or a 72 hour customer outage. Feel free to call me directly at 650-209-3923, if you prefer email you can reach me at pesters (at) tintri (dot) com.
@Peter,
Thank you for responding with your contact details and being so approachable.
@CaptainCanucks,
There are very few companies that would come this far to make sure their customers are satisfied. I hope you see that as well and contact Peter.I am sure any issues that you may have encountered will be addressed.
Peter, Why don’t you outline your support offerings here as well? I am interested in the support offerings Tintri has since it is a startup. How would you compete against the 247 support offered by EMC in locations such as China? I have a heavily virtualized environment spread across 50 sites across the world.
Hi Yim,
We have comparable Support offerings to any of the Enterprise storage providers such as EMC. We offer 24×7 phone support, an online support portal where you can create monitor and update support cases, upload files, and also download software releases and documentation. We also offer global parts break fix support either Next Business Day or 4 Hour response with a Trained Field Engineer. We may be a younger company but our team has many years of experience in Enterprise support. If you have detailed questions I’d encourage you to speak with your local sales team. If you prefer to send me a direct email with your contact info I’ll get it to the correct person in your region.
Thanks,
Pete
Ok this is getting a little silly now. I understand that some of us like one product better than the other but this is really not the way to go about it. Peter, has provided his direct contact info and I encourage you to contact him if your sales/customer support doesn’t address your concerns.
Please don’t use this blog to trash one product over another, we are all adults so lets act like it. I will monitor this post and will personally remove any comments that are related to support unless you use your company’s email address to post the comment. If this is just cheap marketing by competitors, then this is really sad. So if you have a real issue, please contact Peter as he has provided his info, or if you really have to comment, please use your company email to post the comment or else I will consider it bogus and fake.
I will remove any comments regarding support and what not on this post that are posted using some free email service (yahoo, gmail, hotmail etc).
In the end, we are all entitled to our opinion but I feel this is getting a little out of hands now. Hope we can all be reasonable.
On a different note I find it amusing that both CaptainCanucks and Yim Lee posted from the exact same geo location… hmmm and for your own privacy I will not mention what is that location. I will not be shocked if you are both the same person.
This is why, I will remove any comments regarding support or such unless you use your company email address.
We are considering this product for our virtual desktop platform. I’d like to hear more from Enterprise level users and their experiences. We recently had a demo of the product and we were interested.
Hi Tom,
We have a great customer testimonial from the Norwegian School of Economics on their experience including VDI on our website at http://www.tintri.com. The video is on the lower right side of the page. If you have any additional questions you can contact me directly and we’ll have a sales rep speak with you. My contact info is in the blog entries above.
Thanks,
Pete
I can vouch personally for the support at Tintri. Top notch and I have not been disappointed. Monitoring of our array is done remotely at Tintri, provided you allow this feature. If I were to unplug an interface on the device, I would recieve a phone call or email from Tintri within minutes.