Under Promise, Over Deliver
While it is true that Tintri really only works for VMs, we found that the switch to Tintri was the catalyst to move our datacenter to the next century. A storage migration for us was not going to be an overnight cutover, but rather a slow move to new storage. Running VMs on Netapp was a nightmare, and when looking at what upgrades were necessary to get what we needed, we were presented with a forklift upgrade where the cost was more than simply buying a Tintri to add a "next tier" of storage that was not only able to handle our VM workload, but do it better than anyone else in the market. What we found was performance so much better that what we had, and a system so easy to manage, that we moved our server virtualization project to the top of the pile and completed moving all 120 servers to VMs over the next three months. Once we were totally virtualized, we added another Tintri for growth (we weren't planning on moving that fast, but the performance gains were so great that administration was quick to approve additional funds to purchase another unit after what we seen with the first Tintri and the promise that we could totally eliminate the need for the NetApp and its high warranty / maintenance costs). We also added a third Tintri for off-site replication as the replication traffic was compressed so much better than Netapp that the third unit was paid for through the reduced need for additional bandwidth to our DR site.
The best part of this entire project was that we were able to move to Hyper-V in the process to save on licensing fees from VMWare. We have fully embraced Hyper-V, and the transition was easy when we could use one Tintri to host VMs for VMware and Hyper-V at the same time. There was no need to keep creating LUNS and resize drives...it was all done through a single NFS share to VMWare and single SMB 3.0 share to Hyper-V. Really, the Tintri is hands off after about 30 minutes to get it setup. With everything virtual, I know that I can move VMs around quickly, restore them quickly (including granular restores), and so much more. A large job on one server doesn't take down all our storage like it did on the NetApp...it is kept separated from the other VMs so they don't suffer. I don't need to move data from one LUN to another to get better performance or because I am running low on space, it is all handled seamlessly in the background. Our budgets are in-check because we don't need any more emergency upgrades to improve performance, and we don't spend money on consultants to diagnose storage performance problems or to help get things setup, and our VMWare licensing costs are gone...life is good. Best of all, Tintri support is extremely responsive. If you have a question, it takes seconds to get ahold of support. They were able to walk us through some changes to our Cisco UCS configuration for better DR options for storage, even though it really should have come from Cisco support. We have suggest new features and they have been added to later Tintri OS builds that we installed. Really, the smaller, more responsive company has proved to be a benefit and not a hindrance.
Yes, there will also be concerns about newer companies or smaller companies. There is always that risk of a company that over promises and under delivers. I just wanted to provide my two cents as this is the first time in my 25 year IT career where a company so under promised and then over delivered that I still sit here in disbelief
Biting the hand that feeds IT
