Tintri, a DDN company, expanded its VMstore T7000 line with two new storage appliances, the T7060 and T7040. The new additions to the all-NVMe-based T7000 line provide customers with more configuration options, including different levels of VM storage support.
VMstore supplies storage to virtual machines and focuses on the number of VMs it can support. The arrays also focus on managing storage at the VM or application level, according to Eric Burgener, an analyst at IDC. The architecture provides customers with a visibility of the entire application stack, and customers found storage easier to manage at an application level rather than at a block storage level, he said.
Using artificial intelligence, Tintri, which was acquired by DDN in 2018, can tune the system to meet service-level agreements in the face of changing I/O requirements, according to Burgener. This gives customers better predictive planning in performance and capacity.
“Any application you want to virtualize, Tintri is providing an underlying storage infrastructure that’s optimized for providing virtual storage for mixed enterprise workloads,” Burgener said.
What the new additions bring to the table
Initially, the VMstore T7000 all-NVMe storage only included the T7080, with support for up to 7,500 VMs. The addition of the T7060 and T7040 enables customers to pick the VM support they need, up to 5,000 for the T7060 and up to 2,500 for the T7040.
Like the T7080, the two new additions enable customers to pick the size and number of drives, 10 or 24. Tintri also rolled out an update to its operating system, TxOS 5.2, adding new features such as 100 GbE connectivity and support for Wasabi S3-compatible object storage.
According to Breeze, the prior line, EC6000, used the same application-level support but had limitations, particularly around its SATA-based storage that constrained capacity options. The NVMe-based T7000 line, which now replaces the EC6000, uses a higher-performing storage media and supports more capacity options within each appliance.
Customers can now select and customize an appliance based on their use case. They can choose a high-performance, low-capacity model, the T7080, with only 10 drives and lower capacity. On the flip side, if customers have a lower number of VMs with higher capacity needs, they can choose a T7040 with all 24 drives and high-capacity options, up to 8 TB each. Support for 16 and 32 TB drives is coming, according to Breeze.
The VMstore T7000 focuses on anything an enterprise might virtualize, according to Breeze. Tintri supports multiple hypervisors with VMware being the bulk of its business. VMstore isn’t limited to VMs; Tintri can support databases as well including physical Microsoft SQL servers, he said.
Breeze suggested that support will be expanded in the coming year.
“We’re part of — and see across — the infrastructure. We service the objects intrinsically, understand virtual machines that are made of virtual disks. We understand the objects and the sub-objects,” Breeze said. “Ultimately, we’ll be extending that into other areas.”
An updated OS
The Tintri VMstore operating system is now on TxOS 5.2, which includes support for the T7040 and T7060, according to Breeze.
The new OS supports 100 GbE Ethernet, and the T7000 appliances can now ship snapshots or point-in-time copies of a virtual machine to the cloud, such as Amazon S3 or IBM Cloud Object Storage, for data backup and potential recovery efforts using the Tintri Cloud Connector.
