way late to the party
Other vendors have supported open stack, KVM etc for years, Tintri is the late comer here not the other folks. I still firmly believe once VVOLs come out tintri will lose their only edge and they'll end up being someone like Pillar or XIO.
I have a friend or two at Tintri and have had a few long discussions with him on the tech. Their platform has it's use cases but it's pretty limited. Application aware they are not, they are VMware hypervisor aware. Wake me when they integrate with actual applications like Oracle, MSSQL, MySQL(haven't seen anyone integrate with that myself), Exchange, SAP etc etc(looking at their website now I see no indication they are very VM-centric). Wake me when they allow you to take a snapshot of a data set and send that snapshot to another VM(AFAIK you can't do this with VMFS hence my own heavy use of raw device maps for databases - see http://elreg.nateamsden.com/MySQL%20Snapshot%20diagram%20for%20Staging.png)
They have interesting tech but nothing that interests me personally. I want something much more flexible and agnostic. Last I spoke to my friend over there he said Tintri still did not allow NFS exports directly to guest operating systems, they were VMware-only. So now they are adding KVM ..make the storage platform flexible enough to do more things. At the time(about a year ago) he said there wasn't much interest in being more flexible, more agnostic. I have to assume that is because they didn't have enough resources to do it so they stuck to what they did best (probably a good idea).
But adding compute to storage has always been a stupid idea, whoever came up with the concept needs to be taken out back and shot. It's one of those things where when I hear it I really don't have a response, my brain just can't think of how someone could come up with such a incredibly stupid concept to begin with. Now if the system is built from the ground up ala Simplivity and that Nuatix people I think that is different, though I still think both of their approaches are too limited and feel that they will at some point offer a storage-only version of their platform for better scalability(& margins - I've said this before on el reg). The combined platform will be fine for real small SMBs, there's no point in combining such a system for larger scale your too limited with fixed units for scaling. Sometimes you need to scale compute, other times storage, sometimes both, forcing the customer to do both every time is not an efficient way of operating.
I'll be happy with 3PAR for a while yet myself(mission critical storage anyway). They are killing it in the mid range these days and their stuff is only getting better. The core technology folks from 3PAR are still very much leading the march and are heavily shielded by the head of HP storage (ex-3PAR CEO) to do what they do best.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
