Tintri VMstore Reviews

It's our main enterprise storage for our in-house cloud.

In our old location, we had a data center that would have air conditioning or power issues. It just wasn't built to support our growth. If they had to do maintenance on the air conditioner, they would bring in portable air conditioning but that never kept the room cool enough while they repaired the facility. With VMstore, we were able to push a button—and it really is that simple—and flip our primary and secondary storage locations by failing over. Then we would migrate our VMs and be running out of our auxiliary data center. When the repairs were done, we'd just click another button and fail back over to spread the resources out the way we had them previously. 

When we migrated to our new facility, we had some single-mode fiber that was connecting the old facility to the new facility. We just paused our replication, then moved half of our VMware servers and half of our Tintri over to the new location and pushed a button to resync any replication that needed to occur over that two-hour period of moving devices. Then we pushed another button and we were running out of the new building. We then picked up half the resources, moved them into the new building, hit the button again and said, "Resync your replication." We never went down or lost any service. Anybody who was trying to e-file or do court work at that time was never affected by our migration. 

Our friends on the Supreme Court of Georgia do not use the same technology as we do. They had to send out letters and emails to all the clerks in the 159 counties we have in Georgia to notify lawyers and the public that they were going to be unavailable for an extended three to five-day period while they migrated their stuff over to the new building. Meanwhile, our court was getting calls from counties that send us 50 to 100 cases a week asking, "When are you guys going to be offline? And we said, "We're not going to be down or offline at all." That was a significant win for us, and it was all because of Tintri and its technology.

Another advantage is that VMstore has reduced administrative time, without question. Previously, we used a product from LeftHand Networks, which was eventually purchased by HP. We had iSCSI connectivity that came with its own set of chores. When you wanted to set up a new LUN, you had to carve it up and do some other steps. With NFS, you create your connection to your storage blob and then you carve it up by folders or however you want. It makes it incredibly easy. Provisioning storage is so simple that it takes clicks to provision it. And once you've done that, you're done. You configure your storage and you present that much storage to your VMware hosts and then decide, by folder, what you want to call it or how you want to carve it up. It becomes very easy and very easy to expand. We're also able to do a lot of thin provisioning.

Back in the day, you had to care about how many spinning disks, how many spindles, about carving out LUNs, and what the performance would be. You had to make all these decisions when you were using older types of storage arrays. All of that has been taken away. It has freed up some staff time to assume more responsibilities in the infrastructure because we're not spending our time carving up LUNS and migrating a VM from one LUN to the next because we're running out of space. It is very easy to use and you can teach somebody how to use it in an afternoon. You can be an IT generalist and understand it.

We love the

• real-time replication
• ease of use when connecting our servers to the storage
• level of redundancy inside the box.

In terms of the redundancy, with our previous SANs, anytime we wanted to do upgrades or firmware updates, we would have to set aside a maintenance window. But because Tintri has two controllers and everything is redundant, we can do one of them during the day. That means my team will upgrade and fail over from one control to the next, and none of our applications will go down, and our databases don't lose transactions. It's a very steady platform.

It's also simple software and integrates well with VMware so we get a lot of information about all of the VMs, how they're performing individually, and about network latency. That's very helpful when you're troubleshooting a slowdown.

Prior to using this solution, it was hard to get that kind of information. That was before virtual volumes came out in VMware, which was supposed to be designed to give you more individual information. But Tintri is designed like that out-of-the-box. A user will say, "Hey, this transaction was slow," or "This application seems slow today." A lot of times in the past, when we had an iSCSI or fiber connection, it was hard to know which link in the chain was the problem, or whether it was just the user's perception or the application was busy because it was swallowing a high load at that particular time. Now, we're able to go in and look at what the flash use is by the application and whether there are any network latencies. It becomes helpful because we can eliminate many of those issues and conclude that it was an application-level problem, or the service was busy at that particular moment in time with transactions. We can tell that it's not an underlying hardware or infrastructure issue.

I also absolutely love that VMstore enables replication, snapshots, and setting the QoS at the virtual machine level. For QoS, we let the algorithm within the machine itself handle that because our current device is a hybrid T850. It has a set of spinning disks and about five terabytes of flash. You can look at the management console and see how much your applications or VMs are hitting the flash and how many hits are going to disk. The software determines when there are some volumes in your VMs that aren't currently accessed very often and it will put them on the spinning disk. If an indexing program runs and touches those files, or somebody wants to go back and touch files that haven't been touched in a long time, it will read them from disk, which can be slightly slower. But when we will look at the Tintri control panel, our rate of flash hits is almost 99 percent, meaning all of our most important data, the things that people use every day and rely on, are sitting at that flash level and they get the highest level of performance.

And we're leveraging more and more of the snapshotting capabilities for disaster and ransomware recovery. It's becoming one of the tiers that we have. We use Zerto for replication backup and to our offsites, and we're now using the snapshots as another tier of backup and restores. But more importantly, we have two separate Tintri units that we use for real-time replication of "protection groups," things that are our most critical systems. They're replicating between the two.

The graphical user interface for monitoring performance is sufficient and colorful. You can mouse over the items that you want to see and it will break them out. I don't think you could present that data any better. We've recently upgraded the software and there are some additional improvements, but it has been very user-friendly and very easy to read.

Our biggest bump was going from the 4x software to 5x software and getting them to understand the nuances of how we did real-time replication. They have an automated failover that requires a third-party server to be a watchman over the storage cluster, which is very common. When we were doing that upgrade, it turns out we didn't need that. We were doing manual failovers but we still installed that watchman because we thought we needed it to do our upgrade from 4x to 5x. But once we got it up to 5x, we never had to tell our existing replication settings to use the watching node and to do automated failover. It took multiple phone calls and conversations until we finally got to our local sales engineer who has known the product for a longer period of time than some of the support people we were dealing with to clear up that inconsistency.

We have been using Tintri VMstore for somewhere around five years.

The stability has been excellent. We are never a first-mover. We don't get a lot of budget in the state courts, so I'm always looking for things that are cutting-edge, that are enterprise-wide, that I can be an early adopter of, provided that it works really well. We have constitutional requirements that all of our cases be decided within two terms and we're up until 11 o'clock at night finishing those last cases, six times a year. Whatever I install has to be absolutely rock-solid and wholly reliable for those times. We're over 100 years old and we've never missed a deadline. Now that it's all computerized, I don't want to be responsible for them missing that deadline. The software has always been stable.

We're always a point or so behind on upgrades. We watch the VMware, SAN, and Zerto upgrades. All that has to float along. But we watch upgrades to see how they go for a month or so before we do them. That means we haven't really seen a lot of bugs or issues with Tintri.

Tintri has introduced new features that we're currently not using. For example, we've been running a MySQL database for five years, but now they've increased their capability to run much larger databases than we run. They handle the performance and other issues people have when they have really large systems. We aren't leveraging those things, which means we don't know if there is a bug in them. But all the features we use, like real-time replication, snapshotting, and provisioning have been very solid.

The scalability of Tintri is where it could possibly be expensive. 

When we had LeftHand SAN, each storage node was like a mini server so to grow your storage you had to buy a very expensive device to put in there. That would increase the spindles, computing power, and throughput. You got everything, but if you just needed storage, you couldn't do that.

With Tintri, you're doing the same thing. Now, it does allow you to add a unit and then cluster them together to increase the volume size of your scale out. If you are just looking for storage, and you're having to scale out by buying a whole new Tintri node, you're getting additional compute and everything else. I'm not sure that it's the most cost-effective way of doing it. It might be better, instead of scaling it out in their traditional sense, to just add a node, carve it up, and have it be another target for VMware. 

However, in a lot of the newer storage arrays from Tintri, you have a lot more flash space. If you're only buying a unit at a certain size, there are empty slots for you to add to it. That aspect is different with the flash version versus our T850, which was fully provisioned. It's a box of spinning disks and flash. You don't grow it that way. But you can grow the newer units by adding more flash disks.

We're an old customer. When we call in to do a software upgrade, or one of our staff wants to make sure they've read the documentation properly before they do a during-the-day upgrade, their support staff just doesn't have the experience with all of the products that we're running. They don't know the 850 series like we do because it's five years old. There is a little bit of a gap, and that may just be because we're an old customer running on platforms that their staff hasn't seen. I would like to see an improvement in their in-depth knowledge of their older products.

Other than that, their support has always been excellent and responsive.

Positive

It took less than an hour to get VMstore rack-mounted, installed, and starting to serve virtual machines, and the majority of that was unboxing.

We were apprehensive because it was a new device for us. We asked for some help in installing it and they said, "You're really not going to need any help, but our system sales engineer is going to come out to help." We thought it was going to be all about the configuration. Their engineer showed up with a pair of gloves and a strap to help protect his back when lifting it in but we had already racked it, plugged it in, and added it to our VLAN. 

We thought all the work was going to be around how we connect this thing. We didn't understand the NFS stores and how all this works. We wanted to set up replication and didn't know what that was going to be like. But he was expecting that the hardest part of his job was going to be helping us stick the thing in the rack. Once he settled in, we told him, "Hey, we're ready to turn it on." It was a matter of a set of questions, add some IPs and a replication channel. We carved out the storage and had our first VM. In an hour, we had migrated from one of our LeftHand HP storage test servers to this solution.

Maintenance consists of the occasional software upgrade, but every storage has that. We haven't had a flash drive fail or anything else fail and we haven't had to replace a controller on the 850s that we've had running for the last five years.

We've had Tintri for so long that it is hard for me to compare total cost of ownership. But I would think the TCO would be less due to lower administrative costs, less downtime, and the overall ease of management.

When we were buying it originally, the price of Fujitsu, Hitachi, Nimble, and Tintri were all very close to one another in a competitive bid environment. The real cost and savings are going to be the administrative and management costs, which become very negligible in comparison to what you were having to do with a traditional LUN, iSCSI fiber-channel solution.

I've always gotten excellent pricing. I'm very satisfied with the pricing that I receive.

The licensing has gotten simpler. When we bought it, everything was an add-on. If you wanted real-time replication, you bought that as a feature. There were three different levels of software that you could buy, based on what you wanted it to do. Now, that is all wrapped into one SKU and it all comes with it. So it does appear like it is more expensive.

I could see that there may be an issue where some people don't need this or that and don't want to have to license it. Maybe they have licensing options that I haven't discussed with my sales team.

But flash arrays are very expensive, per terabyte. But if you're looking at the fact that they're doing deduplication and compression, and now they're doing on-disk encryption, you're getting a tremendous number of features so I think they offset each other. If you're not using one feature, you're probably going to use another.

We still buy our array from the point of view of what the real, raw storage is versus the compressed storage that they market it at. They'll say, "This is a 60-terabyte array," but you find out that it's really 36 terabytes and they're anticipating maybe a two-to-one or better compression rate. We're an appellate court and 99 percent of what we deal with are huge volumes of PDFs. Those things just don't compress.

I haven't looked at what some of the other solutions are charging these days for some of the individual software pieces, but I feel that there is a lot of value in the simplicity, ease of use, and hands-off nature of Tintri. You're getting tremendous value based on time. You're avoiding having to have another staff member, at some point, to manage your storage because it is so simply managed and takes care of itself. You can task the people you have doing that to do other things. That's what we did.

We looked at Fujitsu and Nimble, which was purchased by HPE. We were looking for real-time replication. Fujitsu had an option for doing real-time replication but it didn't fully support vVols yet. But that's where you were going to get that additional detail, by having it defined as a virtual volume. There were APIs that would allow you to see more individual information about each VMware guest server that you're running. 

That was a key difference. Once we dug into it, it was a no-brainer. With Tintri, you don't have to define anything or go through all these extra steps of configuration. It was actually something we were apprehensive about because it seemed too good to be true, that it was going to be that easy and would work that well. I've been doing this for about over 26 years and I've spent a lot of time in rooms listening to sales engineers and marketing people tell us how things are going to work and how easy they are. But when you actually get them into your data center and try to do those things, it turns out there are 15 other things you have to do or it doesn't work quite that way. Marketing and engineering don't always meet.

We were very pleasantly surprised that that was not the case here. We were actually kind of shocked. 

The situation with Nimble was that they were working on synchronous replication and that was something we really wanted. With our LeftHand network solution, we were able to do a stretch cluster because it was a network RAID. We had so many nodes running in one data center and so many nodes running in the other. If we had to turn them off, or they went out in one of them, the storage would stay up, but we would be running in a degraded, slower manner. We wanted to keep it up in the event of having to fail.

With Nimble, we thought synchronous replication was in alpha or beta, but when we sat down to get the demo and started asking the guy questions, he was showing us an animation. It wasn't real servers doing real devices. It was just a very fancy simulation of how it was supposed to work and there really wasn't a product yet.

Don't be afraid to try something different, because Tintri is different in the sense that it's an NFS volume and a simple blob of storage. You have to trust that it's going to give you the performance that you need. In so many other solutions you are in control of that performance: How many spindles you assign to a database and how much of it is flash. Are you creating this LUN? Are you running it over multiple devices so that you can get the most performance out of it? What RAID level do you use? What protection level are you going to run? Is it RAID 5, RAID 10, or RAID 20? All that goes away, and when you're used to doing and thinking in those terms you'll say, "Well, how could it be this easy?" You will think, "I've been doing it this way always, how could it be so different?" But it really can be and it works very well.

Around the time we bought from Tintri, they went public, and by the time we owned it and had it in production, they imploded. We looked at the product and said, "HPE or Dell is about to buy this. They're buying everything else and this stuff is too good." We couldn't understand how Tintri could not be doing well. It was an absolute no-brainer when we bought it. When DDN bought the company, I did a little research and said, "DDN is a very solid company." It looked like they were trying to get into the small-enterprise market with their storage, versus the stuff that they were building. Having such an old, solid company purchase Tintri and put resources into it and support it, told me that they recognized how good the technology was and that it was worth having. And they've been nothing but solid ever since.

I'm a fan of Tintri. I think more about people clicking on bad emails these days than I ever do about my storage. That was not always the case. I used to always worry about things like, "Hey, that RAID 6, if there's a bad drive you have to replace it. Are two drives going to go? Do we get four-hour response? Do we have a cold spare?" I don't even think about that stuff anymore. I give Tintri a 10 out of 10.

We use it for all our VMs. It's our primary VM storage. 97% of our architecture is completely virtualized. We won't run a VM unless it's on Tintri. We also use it in our automation. 

Tintri has changed the way that you do NFS for VMs, which is a big deal. Usually, NFS for VMs is very chatty and causes you a lot of problems. Tintri rewrote the NFS for virtuality that allows each basic VM to get its own line at the checkout stand. What this does is that it gives much more response. I don't have problems with performance. I can virtualize pretty much anything without any slowdown or any issues. Plus, I'm easily able to replicate or clone hundreds of VMs up from one in an instance. With automation tied with our Ansible, Tintri is one of the most powerful tools in our toolbox.

It frees up my guys to innovate. They're not dealing with slow storage calls. They're not dealing with performance calls. Storage used to be a big issue where one person was maintaining it all the time. Not having to maintain that storage or groom or manicure that storage gives them the freedom to do other things. Tintri is like its own employee because it allows you to do other things besides storage. It has helped very much to reduce administrative time.

In terms of visibility, it gives me enough ammo so that when all the finger-pointing starts, I can always point to the network and say, "Hey, it's you."

We're constantly developing, iterating, and doing new VMs. So, the ability to move fast and the ability to have high-speed storage is valuable. In the case of something like Atlassian where you work with Jira and you're rolling out your own updates or something like that, you might need to iterate a 500-gig server six times to find all the issues. Even Atlassian will tell you that the first time you upgrade their stuff, it doesn't usually work, so get ready to try it again in your lab. When you are working in a lab environment or need to do things like that, the abilities that the backend of Tintri has are just amazing. They allow you to utilize and take advantage of that. I can spin up five 500-gig VMs without taking a hit to my data store, my performance, or my total overall storage. That's because of the way Tintri does the dedup and the blocks. It has already got all these blocks until the delta gets changed. Even though you've got five 500-gig VMs, which should be 2,500 gigs or 2.5 terabytes, it's not seeing it as that because it has got to compact it and basically zip, but they're all running until the delta gets far enough apart. That allows me to do things I wasn't able to do on my NetApp. It was like you can only have one other copy, and that's it because it's going to be a one-to-one clone. 

It enables replication, snapshots, and setting QoS at the virtual machine level, which is super important. We don't use quality of service because the service is so good. Once in seven years, I might have used that. It's already running and performing. So, the QoS runs on its own. It's great.

Its performance is amazing. Since I have put Tintri in, I haven't had a complaint from anybody about slowness. On top of that, there is block-level cloning and the ability to spin up VMs. We use that in our architecture. We don't deploy in a traditional manner anymore by using a kickstart server, ISO, or anything. We keep VM templates, not even VMware templates. We utilize Tintri with Ansible to provision our environments, and it's pretty awesome. It's instantaneous and very cool.

Its GUI is very good now. For a long time, it had been Flash. When Flash got deprecated, they were able to roll out everything to HTML5. The new HTML5 is in Tintri Global Center as well as on the individual VM stores, which is great. In the NetApp days, NetApps were dinosaurs. It took one person to manage the storage, carve out LUNS, carve out aggregates, etc. One person would spend all his time on storage, whereas Tintri is like a 30-minute challenge where you can order a Domino's pizza and get it. You plug it in, and it just runs. It is that intuitive and that simple. The GUI is very straightforward. It shows you a nice mapping of the hardware and everything else and how it's working. It's a true example of plug-and-play. For something which is as important as your storage, I can't emphasize how much and how important that is. It is literally one of the single most important pieces of hardware I have in my data centers.

I have a T880, T800, and T1000. The problem Tintri has is that they make their products so good that you don't ever need to replace them. You just need to buy more. They have kind of shot themselves in the foot with that. I update my software, and I've never reached the end where I couldn't update the software. I'm still running a couple of six-year-old Tintri that are killing what people bought yesterday. They had some initial issues with their first offering and their old management before they were bought by DDN, but the hardware and the platform have always been solid and spectacular. When they had all that issues, I stuck tight and held them. I was like, "No, this hardware is too good." I believed in it, and then DDN came and picked it up. They saw what I saw. Anybody who uses it will have the same opinion.

I'm waiting to see the Kubernetes package. I know they're releasing one, but I haven't seen it yet. So, I'm waiting to see that. 

As long as they stay, I don't want them to rest on their laurels. They're been great. I want them to continue innovating. The way it is VM-aware storage, it'd be nice to see cluster-aware storage as well. That'd be cool, and I know they're working on that.

I have been using this solution for about seven years.

They're pretty stable now.

It's very scalable.

They're great. We had to have a drive and a controller plate repaired. There have been three or four calls in seven years. They were great. Within four hours, they fixed it, and nothing has ever gone down. Everything that's been done persisted. I would rate them a 9 out of 10.

Positive

I was previously on NetApp, and then we looked pretty thoroughly when we went to Tintri. I looked at Pure. I looked at Tegile. We got 3PAR in our data center as well for databases. We were all over the place. We looked at NetApp again.

At the time, we were very much a NetApp business. We had five racks of NetApps. The guy that got me looking at storage was the guy from Pure, and it wasn't Tintri at all. The guy from Pure said, "Well what if I could do your five racks of storage in like 4U? And I was like, "4U? You're kidding me. No way. You can't do that." So, I started looking at Pure. I liked Pure first and was looking at them, but then they had this big thing with their iSCSI. I was like, "Ah, I don't want to change all my NFS and networks." So, I got ready to shop more. 

We looked at Tegile, and then we looked at NetApp, but NetApp would have required a forklift. I just didn't like what they were doing, and then we came to Tintri. It was really impressive. The guys who had solved virtualization at VMware had left and gone to solve the issue for storage. Their storage was great, and the product was great. The product was just amazing. At the end of the day, that's what it came down to, and when you add that with the pricing, you can't lose.

I took a lot of flak internally in my company by standing by Tintri because we had bought all these Tintris, and then Tintri went bankrupt. I stood by them and said, "Hey, let's not jump ship." A lot of people I knew ripped out their Tintri and put in a Pure because they were like, "I have to have something I can build. I have to get more." And I was like, "Just wait, just wait. Trust me." I waited, and I saw Western and DDN go at it. Either one of them was going to be great. DDN won, and DDN has been a great partner. I've seen them advance, buy, and try to move the needle. That does make me very happy to know that it's in a much safer, stable place with DDN because I was getting the side eyes from C-level executives saying, "Hey, we just put all this money into Tintri, and they just went belly up." So, to see the validity of my faith in the product was good. It was very good to see that somebody else saw the same thing, bought it, and took it to that stable level. I was very happy with it.

You can order a pizza and set it up. You got two management cables, two data cables, and a replication cable. You just plug it in.

I moved one the other day because we moved our lab, and it took under 10 minutes. There are two rails that pop in. The toughest part is the rails. You got to lift the box out. You have another person there to help you, and in five to seven minutes, you're in. It takes you longer to plug in cables and power cords and run them than it does to do anything else.

In terms of maintenance, we upgrade the software once every six months.

We have a VAR, P1 Technologies, that we work through, but we do all the work ourselves. They've been our teacher, and they've been a partner. In the seven years, I've been through many different people at Tintri. A lot of the same people are still there, but I've been with my VAR the whole time. They've never changed.

We have seen an ROI. It's worth the money.

It has helped to reduce our total cost of ownership, but I don't have the metrics. We use it heavily in our automation platforms.

It's very competitive.

I would advise playing with it. Don't hesitate. Go buy it. Jump into that Tintri toolkit. There are a lot of cool features in there. Once you stop looking at storage for what storage does, you can find many other things that it does and you're like, "Wow, I didn't even know I could do that with my storage because I've been so busy focusing on these three areas. Now that I don't even think about those three areas anymore, I can use my storage for this." So, think outside the box and play with that Tintri toolkit. It's time to get on the Tintri train and stop thinking about your storage.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10.

VMstore provides fast storage for virtual hosts. We deploy VMstore in various environments. Traditionally, we have primarily deployed it to on-premise servers. However, that has changed in the last two years. More companies are moving to 365, so you have more of a hybrid solution. Either works well because the box is highly adaptable. We're using a T820 currently, but we just signed an order to buy a T7000 series.

We're a telecommunications and IT company. We have a small data center in Leicester that started as a large server room with servers running services for customers who asked us to do different things. The business grew to the point where we hosted virtual machines and remote desktop services for multiple companies. We had to create a proper hosting environment, so we added the Dell Blade and Tintri array. It's housed in a single data center we own and operate.

We currently have six businesses running from that Tintri box, and the end-user accounts number about 500.

Previously, we managed individual servers as hosts with virtual machines running inside. We consolidated about seven individual hosts into one VMstore joined to a Dell blade array that we purchased at the same time. That saves a massive amount of time on ongoing maintenance management. VMstore probably reduces administration time by about 15 to 20 percent. It also saves significant power costs because we've turned off about nine servers in the last seven years. 

What formerly may have taken up a terabyte or two on a server only requires half that on the VMstore. It has increased efficiency while saving time and power costs. It's easier to use and a huge step up in reliability. Overall, it's a high-speed storage solution, which was a significant upgrade.

VMstore has made our company more profitable. We've increased our retail sales and margins while decreasing the time spent managing the solution. We sold this as a significant upgrade to a premium service when moving customers to this new array. Depending on the customer, we increased our retail charges for these services by between 10 and 15 percent. Without fail, every customer paid for it, and they were pleased with the service. 

I like Tintri's Global Admin feature and the solution's performance. It's incredibly fast storage, which was a significant upgrade for us when we deployed it seven years ago. The Tintri snapshots are brilliant and incredibly reliable.

The visibility at the VM level is another feature we wanted, and it didn't disappoint. The replication, snapshots, and setting QoS are also critical features. It not only has those features but also lots of fast storage arrays that have similar features. Other fast storage arrays require some PowerShell commands and a lot of configuration to set up or enable those things. It's effortless with VMstore. You tick a couple of boxes and apply. You can send a message from the Slack bot, and I'll do it for you.

Tintri's Cloud Connector currently only goes to AWS and IBM Cloud, and we don't use either because we're Microsoft Silver Partners. It would be great to get the Cloud Connector feature with Azure. If it's not already on Tintri's roadmap, that's something I'd like to see.

While the performance and capacity monitoring GUI is excellent, I'd like to see multiple windows simultaneously. You can see various statistics, but it would be great to have that across several frames to monitor more things simultaneously. That's a minor issue. 

We've used VMstore for seven years.

VMstore is incredibly stable. It has not missed a heartbeat in seven years. The only issue we ever had was caused by a Microsoft update to Active Directory, not Tintri. 

The scalability internally through VMstore is quick and easy. Scaling up the physical boxes is also dead easy. You buy another box, plug it in, connect it, and away it goes in 30 minutes.

I rate Tintri support nine out of 10. Tintri support was excellent when we paid for it, but we stopped paying for it. Even though we stopped paying for support, an army of Tintri people, especially our account manager, helped us In our recent crisis caused by the Microsoft update, and it was hugely appreciated.

Positive

We had a Dell EqualLogic P4000 Series SAN that we no longer used for live customer data because it was so old. We used to have one Dell server per customer, which was unsustainable in terms of the time, effort, and power it takes to manage so many servers. It wasn't just a technology change—it's an entirely different way of thinking. 

This wasn't our specialty. We did it for one or two companies because they asked and developed from there. As we started providing this service to more customers, we got more sophisticated. Eventually, we reached a point where we decided to build a proper hosted server storage array.

VMstore was one of the most impressive deployments I've seen. It took 30 minutes. I remember walking away thinking, "Wow! They've just installed and delivered a SAN, connected it, and we've got a VM on it in 30 minutes. That's ridiculous."

We also did some preparation and planning before we deployed. We readied the new network where it was going to sit. The Dell blade array chassis was installed, and the blades were ready. The Tintri had arrived in a box about three days before, but we didn't touch it. 

The Tintri engineer came, and I helped him rack it. He connected it, and within 30 minutes, we created our first VM. After that, the Tintri engineer remained on site for about three or four hours, going through stuff with my remote colleague and showing him how all the different features work.

After deployment, VMstore requires some maintenance like all solutions, but it is minimal compared to the more traditional SANs and a lot less maintenance relative to managing multiple individual servers.

Server rentals for only one customer covered the entire cost of the box, so the rental income for everybody else we have hosted for the past seven years has been profit. VMstore has reduced our overall business costs in terms of time and power. VMstore is much more efficient and easy to manage, enabling us to decommission seven other individual servers, which has helped us reduce our power usage.

The price could be lower, but the pricing structure is what it is. This requires a heavy upfront investment, and you recoup it. It's just the nature of the business. I'm sure every company would like to see the price decrease, but I would like to see the additional software and ongoing support costs lowered.

There are two support variants: Gold and Platinum. I would suggest adding a third rung to that ladder with minimal support, access to software upgrades, and maybe an SLA with a 48-hour or 72-hour ticket window. Tintri would get a massive response at that support level, especially for smaller businesses like us.

At the same time, I fully understand that if you offer a lower level of support, people will opt for that instead of premium support. However, it would be nice if there were a support option with reduced service. If you're paying less, you should get less. From our point of view, the main aspects are software upgrades, patches, and security features. We want to ensure the box is healthy and access a help desk with a 72-hour SLA. Something like that would be ample for us.

We had quotes from Dell, HP, Pure Storage, and NetApp. All the servers we use are Dell, so there was a significant comfort factor, but it ultimately came down to a decision between Dell SAN and Tintri SAN. On the one hand, it made sense to go with a Dell SAN because we already had a Dell blade array. However, at that stage, Dell was still building their SANs on a more traditional footing, where configuration and management were quite intensive. 

The Tintri box was faster than the Dell, and it was much easier to build a VM. It was like night and day. You could send a message from the Slack bot, spin up two VMs, and the VMs were created seconds later. On the Dell SAN, it might take 15 to 20 minutes to do the same thing manually. We recognized Tintri as a leading-edge technology changing how it was done. We appreciated how the box operated, and it did disappoint.

About two years after we got our box, we were told that Tintri was in financial trouble, but we didn't panic because we knew how this technology market worked. We knew one of the bigger fish would swallow it up, and along came DDN. While it wasn't necessarily a factor, you want to ensure ongoing support and that the company will be around a year after you buy it. 

When we purchased VMstore, it was a stable business, and there were no indications that it was in danger. When Tintri did become in trouble, we knew the product was good, and we knew how the storage market worked, so we were confident somebody would purchase it. When DDN did, we knew we were okay.

I rate Tintri VMstore nine out of 10. I never give 10s unless it's perfect. The only perfect thing in this world is Liverpool FC. If you can, get a loaned box to try it out first. If Tintri has an old box somewhere or they allow you to get your hands on a box and connect it, I would be surprised if the IT company in question doesn't say, "Okay, this is good." 

You read a lot of data and statistics and can say that it can do fast storage, SSDs, VME, etc. Ultimately, you don't know anything about a product or a service until you use it. Having a loaned device and getting engineers to play around with it live is invaluable.

We implemented Tintri VMstore on our environment for storage management, and we deployed all our VMs on Tintri. 

We were looking for a solution that was easy to manage and easy to implement. 

In the past, we faced a performance bottleneck with our storage, and we have had instances when NFS mount points got disconnected by themselves. 

Tintri has provided us with stability and faster speed. We were also looking for a solution that is compatible with our existing Hypervisor environment, and Tintri has fulfilled that requirement.

Tintri VMstore has superior performance. It provides us with up to 30% faster performance than our old storage solutions. 

The T7000 series of VMstore has the capability to forecast resource requirements and capacity. Tintri VMStore has a unique filesystem that can manage performance and help us to oversee workloads. 

We have been able to scale up to ten VM storages and 500 VMs through a single pane of glass. That is a big plus for using the Tintri solution. Tintri is easy to automate using Powershell and Rest API.

We have found better performance, predictive analysis, and ease of use, and it supports site-to-site replication. 

Tintri VMstore provides a single pane of glass to manage all your VMs and hypervisors, it is very easy to scale. 

Automation comes naturally in Tintri using simple PowerShell and REST API. 

The faster performance of Tintri has reduced latency across our network, storage, and VMs. We now have more visibility across our VMs which has enhanced our user experience and helped accelerate deployments.

Tintri has a feature called Tintri Global Center, which helps to monitor and control our infrastructure with a single click. This works fine if you want to look at existing data, however, if you want to monitor dynamically with a granularity of seconds that it requires a connection back to Tintri central, which is an extra step and not so convenient to use. Also, we have noticed that while Tintri has improved our infrastructure performance by 30%, the performance drops significantly if we exceed SSD capacity.

Following additional features, we would like to see in the new release:

1. The fixing of the performance issue when we exceed SSD capacity.

2. Documentation support in major languages besides English (as we have teams spread out across multiple countries).

3. Having a one-click GUI to create snapshots of the storage.

4. Detailed reporting is missing in the current version. We would like to see this feature added in a new release.

We have been using Tintri VMstore for more than one year.

Tintri VMstore provided us up to 99.99% scalability.

We have been easily able to scale from 100 to 500+ VMs using Tintri VMstore; we have had no challenges scaling up while using Tintri VMspot

We were using HPE Nimble Storage earlier, and we were looking for a better-performing solution with a faster processing speed and a single pane of glass management.

As it is a flash array storage, it is much more expensive than a traditional disk-based storage system.

We did evaluate the following options before finally settling on Tintri VMstore:

1. PureStorage

2. Dell PowerStore

3. Dell Unity

We use it mostly for our VM storage.

The benefit we have seen is the simplification. Using Tintri has been more of a set-and-forget-it situation where I trust that Tintri performs as expected. And it does. It definitely reduces administrative time. Once I set it up I barely had any issues with storage.

The cloning is very fast.

Also, the fact that VMstore enables you to do replications, snapshots, and setting QS at a virtual machine level is awesome because it's more of a set-and-forget-it type of situation.

Another aspect I like is that it's very simple. It's an easy GUI to use.

I have not had any major problems with it except that one of the controllers failed one time. But that didn't hinder performance because there were two of them.

A feature like replication for disaster recovery would be nice.

I have been using Tintri VMstore since 2016-2017. I used one of the earlier models with no SSDs. It was mostly physical drives.

It's very stable. I've never had any problems with Tintri. They usually are pretty good at keeping track of their equipment. Usually, because they have noticed some hard drives are going down or are bad, they have already sent us drives to replace them. Tintri is one of the appliances that I barely needed to look at and maintain.

Although now we have SSD drives, during the time that I was using it, it was mostly physical drives. What I feel would be nice, in terms of a wishlist, is scalability. Rather than replacing the whole appliance, I would like to be able to just add another unit and scale it like that. I know there are some limitations to things like that, but scalability, as opposed to having to buy a new appliance for higher capacity, would be good.

Their tech support is above average.

Positive

We didn't have other storage, at that time, that was VM-ready, such as Pure Storage and others. What we mostly had was some sort of NFS storage. The storage that we were using was old and not really VM-centric. When we moved to Tintri, it provided the best solution for everything. 

We switched because of performance. Isilon wasn't really meant for VM.

It took three to four hours to get VMstore rack-mounted, installed, and starting to serve the virtual machines.

In terms of maintenance, I just rely on the notifications and check on it from time to time. It has been pretty self-reliant.

What I have heard, price-wise, is that Tinti was definitely very competitive. That's one of the reasons it was chosen for us.

We did play around with a little bit of vSAN, but that was a little bit more complicated and more expensive, considering the licensing.

For day-to-day use, VMstore has been solid VM storage for us.

We primarily use Tintri VMstore solution for our VM database storage needs. Previously we used IBM flash storage services. However, it had significant drawbacks. So, we switched to Tintri VMstore solution, and it met all our storage needs and more. 

The extra layer of security it provides is also very valuable for our organization. We use 24 VMs in our environment currently, and our customer database contains sensitive information. With the help of Tintri VMstore solution, we are also on the right path for future expansions.

Tintri VMstore solution brought a very positive change and impact on our day-to-day operations, and we have encountered little to no hiccups until now. 

As explained earlier, with all our physical and virtual infrastructure, the Tintri VMstore solution has been very helpful in managing our needs and provides easy integrations and extra layers of security. 

Overall, using Tintri VMstore solution compared to the previously used alternatives and have given us far better output and services, and support over the period of its use.

The data encryption feature adds a valuable security enhancement with no impact on performance. The SecureVM feature of Tintri VMstore encrypts all data going through it with zero impact on performance or output and can be managed using the VMStore dashboard. 

This adds an additional layer of security to the organization's infrastructure and is a valuable additional feature. 

Since all the data we are processing is sensitive and a compromise cannot be afforded, using Tintri VMstore has benefited the organization thus far.

We need more options to integrate with cloud storage options other than the current AWS and IBM that it currently supports. We also use Microsoft Azure services for a portion of our database and would like to see the seamless integration of that platform with Tintri VMstore as well. 

Additionally, support ticket times could be reduced, and the method could be made a little more robust to save time and effort. 

The addition and improvement of these features can make Tintri VMstore stand out as the leading solution for VM storage and Database management.

I've used the solution for two years.