Embracing the philosophy of ‘more is more’ with Tintri

The saying ‘less is more’ was first popularised by German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and today minimalism is a movement that extends to many aspects of life, including architecture, lifestyle, home décor and fashion.

But Tintri would argue that, in the arena of IT, sometimes you need to embrace a philosophy of ‘more is more’.

So says Michael Donaldson, Tintri Product Manager at value-added distributor Networks Unlimited, who explains: “Tintri, a provider of intelligent infrastructure for virtualised and non-virtualised enterprise IT, brings better insights into systems, as well as improved understandings of workload activity: how your organisation and its users are behaving as regards interaction with data.

“Intelligent infrastructure means the automation of a greater part of the data and storage environments, which reduces the overheads on administrators, and also provides better ways of keeping systems optimal and efficient. Tintri proposes that intelligent infrastructure needs to acquire knowledge and then apply that knowledge to optimise its own performance, settings or configurations.”

In a recent blog post, Erwin Daria, Field CTO at Tintri, asks these questions about the company’s solutions: “So where do go from here? How do we improve the most unique and compelling storage technologies in the world today?

“Simply put: Just let them do more.”

According to Daria, “…Tintri VMstore technology is about more than speeds and feeds. Even advanced performance and availability features are undifferentiated today. VMstore is really about changing the conversation and delivering operational value that’s unparalleled in today’s storage market.”

He notes the recent release of the availability of the VMstore T7080 marks the debut of NVMe technology for the VMstore platform, clarifying: “By coupling DDN’s battle-hardened NVMe hardware with Tintri’s Intelligent Infrastructure software, the VMstore T7080 represents a new pinnacle in performance density and scale. It reaches these heights while continuing to reduce administrative overhead by as much as 95%.”

Donaldson explains: “NVMe, or non-volatile memory express, is a host controller interface and storage protocol created to accelerate the transfer speed of data between enterprise and client systems and solid-state drives (SSDs) over a computer's high-speed Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) bus. NVMe provides an alternative to the Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) standard and the ATA standard for connecting and transmitting data between a host system and a peripheral target storage device.

“The ATA command set in use with SATA SSDs, and the SCSI command set for SAS SSDs, were both developed at a time when hard disk drives and tape were the primary storage media. NVMe was designed for use with faster media.”

In addition to the recent debut of NVMe technology for the VMstore platform, says Daria, Tintri also offers VMstore support for VMware Tanzu persistent volumes for containers, in addition to virtual machines and databases. He explains that the Tintri approach here analyses heterogenous managed objects in real-time, and adapts to their respective behaviours with sub-millisecond latency, without human intervention.

“This approach relieves admins from performing hundreds of hours of arcane tasks per year, such as performance sizing, provisioning and troubleshooting. As a result, organisations can quickly meet the needs of the business and their most important applications,” he notes.

Donaldson adds: “This in turn frees up human employees to apply their time and attention to less mundane activities and embark on more creative uses of their time. Tintri clients have been known to save millions of hours and billions of dollars annually.”

Daria concludes by saying: “At Tintri, we understand that today’s enterprise must be dynamic and agile, and we also understand that in order to best serve our customers’ customers, today’s enterprise infrastructure must also become dynamic and agile – and in our view – intelligent.

“From our early innovations like AI-driven Auto-QoS and intelligent federation (for scale-out), to our release of NVMe platforms, to the expansion into new managed objects like SQL databases and Tanzu persistent volumes – Tintri has taken the most intelligent high-performance storage systems in the world and quite simply…just let them do more.”

Tintri is distributed in South Africa by Networks Unlimited.