Tintri — A New Approach to Storage for Virtualization goo.gl/SFrVE

1. VENDOR PROFILE
Tintri — A New Approach to Storage for Virtualization
Gary Chen
IDC OPINION
Virtualization is the new normal in the datacenter, with virtual exceeding physical in
new shipments and in the installed workload base. Virtualization has had a ripple
effect on the datacenter, affecting every subsystem, especially storage. IDC finds:
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 Customers want to virtualize a larger and larger percentage of their workloads,
but challenges of scale and performance are obstacles. IDC data has shown that
on the storage side, managing capacity growth and application performance in
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virtual environments are the top issues. Most customers are aware that storage
is usually the most important subsystem that can determine the success or
failure of a virtualization deployment. As most customers have already virtualized
the easy workloads, the remaining workloads are increasingly mission critical and
performance sensitive, demanding a greater level of storage support.
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 The nature of how storage is deployed is also changing with the emergence of
converged infrastructure and the role of VM admins, who hold increasingly
greater influence in IT. Support, optimization, and integration with virtualization
are already key for any storage vendor today as virtualization is ubiquitous and
Global Headquarters: 5 Speen Street Framingham, MA 01701 USA
the storage industry continues to focus on solving the unique storage problems
that virtualization creates.
IN THIS VENDOR PROFILE
This IDC Vendor Profile analyzes Tintri, a company producing a storage appliance
specifically designed for virtual environments, and reviews key success factors:
market potential, technology/solution, and corporate strategy.
SITUATION OVERVIEW
Company Overview
Tintri, based in Mountain View, California, produces a storage appliance that attaches
to and is optimized specifically for virtualized environments. Founded in 2008, Tintri
launched out of stealth mode in March 2011.
Tintri is VC funded, having completed a Series C round, with a total of $35 million
raised to date. The company employs around 55 people, with engineering being the
largest group. It has a small marketing team and is growing the sales team rapidly, as
Filing Information: December 2011, IDC #232129, Volume: 1
Storage Solutions: Storage and Virtualized Environments: Vendor Profile

2. well as continuing to add engineers. Tintri has put together a team with backgrounds
in storage as well as in virtualization.
Tintri VMstore
Tintri VMstore was built from the ground up to solve storage problems in virtual
environments. Tintri looked at host-based solutions and software-only solutions but
ultimately felt that a hardware solution built from scratch was needed. The primary
secret sauce is in the file system developed for the device. Being built from scratch
for virtualization, the device offers unique features for virtual environments:
 VMstore manages use of the constructs used in VMware vCenter (VMs, virtual
disks) instead of storage constructs (LUNs, volumes, files, RAID groups).
 VM-aware storage allows easier troubleshooting and performance tuning due to
the ability to easily pinpoint where in the stack, from the storage layer to the
guest OS layer, the bottleneck or problem is. VMstore is able to determine what
percentage of latency is generated from the hypervisor, network, guest OS, file
system, or media.
 VMstore gauges give visibility into available performance and capacity left on the
device.
 Snapshotting takes place at the VM level rather than at the LUN or volume level.
 VMstore automatically aligns virtual disks to optimize I/O efficiency.
 VMstore can "pin" individual VMs or virtual disks to flash for high-performance
workloads.
 VMstore is easy to set up and manage. Since the appliance is built only for
virtualization, it is already configured and optimized for that use case. Customers
simply attach the storage to their VMware vCenter and begin working with VM
and virtual disk objects. Users are never exposed to the underlying storage
details. Each appliance is a single datastore, making it easy to map into vSphere
and to add more devices to scale out.
VMstore is offered in two configurations: an 8.5TB (useable capacity), 4U single
controller model (model T445) and a 13.5TB (useable capacity), 3U dual controller
model (model T540). VMstore is in its second generation, adding auto aligning of
virtual disks and the new dual controller model for high availability. The storage array
is a hybrid of both spinning disks and SSD in RAID 6 configuration that offers fast
performance while keeping the cost down. VMstore has dual 1GbE ports for
management and dual 10GbE ports for data for model T445 and quad ports for model
T540; the T445 lists for $65,000, and the T540 lists for $95,000. It currently only
supports VMware vSphere 4.x and 5.x via NFS, but the architecture is hypervisor
agnostic, allowing Tintri to support other hypervisors in the future.
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3. Company Strategy
The majority of the leadership team has extensive experience in the industry,
specifically focusing on storage and virtualization:
 Kieran Harty: Cofounder and CEO; previously executive VP of R&D at VMware
for seven years
 Mark Gritter: Cofounder and Architect; previously staff engineer at Sun
Microsystems
 Pratik Wadher: VP of Engineering; previously VP of engineering at Data Domain
 Chris Bennett: VP of Marketing; previously VP of Product Management at
NetApp for 10 years
Tintri is differentiating itself with several key features unique to virtual environments
and marketing its solution as one that takes away the barriers to virtualization, rather
than focusing on pure price or performance, though certainly those are areas that
must be addressed to some degree. Tintri is focusing on a specific user profile:
 Heavy virtualizers with over 100 VM admins who are experiencing pain with their
virtualization deployments
 Using VMstore to address specific applications that are difficult to virtualize, such
as database
 Targeting the large enterprise across all verticals
 Focusing on enabling the storage admin to offer the VM admin self-service
Tintri has been using a sales model that has channel engagement in all its deals, led
by a direct sales team. VMstore is a complementary subsystem for virtualization and
thus generally gets included in larger virtualization deals led by partners that choose
Tintri to address certain scenarios. Tintri currently has over 40 customers, which
include TIBCO, Digital Chocolate, iPass, Northwestern University, Loyola Marymount
University, North West Group, Norwegian School of Economics (NHH), and Semmes-
Murphey Neurologic and Spine Institute.
Tintri is primarily United States focused today but is expanding internationally, having
recently formed an EMEA sales team. Tintri also has two current distribution partners,
NOX in Japan and Zycko in the United Kingdom.
Tintri has stated that it has grown more than 100% quarter over quarter since launch.
FUTURE OUTLOOK
Tintri has a unique product that homes in on a very specific set of challenges around
virtualization. As virtualization has already established itself as the new normal in the
datacenter, this lends Tintri many opportunities in the market, especially as customers
©2011 IDC #232129 3

4. run into a wall regarding virtualization and look for specific solutions that allow them to
virtualize more challenging workloads and achieve more scale.
The biggest challenge Tintri faces is from large incumbent storage vendors that are
able to address a wide variety of storage use cases and insert themselves into
enterprises as a single storage source. Certainly, the long-term exit strategy is
acquisition by one of these vendors that would look to bolster their virtualization
capabilities.
But in the short term, Tintri must focus on addressing workloads that others can't. The
key will be inserting itself into the right deals. Building out the channel will be critical
as VMstore can be folded into larger virtualization deployments as a specific problem-
solving solution that the partner identifies. Also, Tintri needs to identify specific
workloads that are suited to VMstore and partner with these ISVs and their channels
to present VMstore as a solution to bring these workloads into the virtual world.
There is a lot of focus in the market today on storage for virtual environments as
storage has shown itself to be the most impacted subsystem and the most critical for
virtualization success. With a new ground-up approach to storage in virtual
environments, Tintri has a unique offering that can be compelling to many advanced
virtualizers.
ESSENTIAL GUIDANCE
Advice for Tintri
 Recruit specific virtualization partners that are in a position to identify scenarios
that Tintri can address and bring them into deals.
 Target specific ISV applications and get inserted into those channels to help
virtualize those workloads.
 Continue to develop best-of-breed VMware integration. VASA and VAAI will be
important APIs to support as well as integration with VMware's Storage DRS and
profile-driven storage features. Partnering with VMware may be challenging as a
smaller vendor but important to stay ahead of the curve in supporting the latest
storage APIs and features as virtualization-specific features and integration are
Tintri's primary differentiators.
 Build out a complementary ecosystem that can address issues such as backup,
replication, deduplication, and compliance management, and leverage Tintri's
VM-specific features to do it better.
 Begin building support for other virtualization environments. While VMware
dominates the market today, major new releases from Microsoft and Red Hat in
the coming years are expected to gain share. As the market diversifies, it will be
important for Tintri to be able to address the full virtualization market, especially
as customers begin adopting multiple hypervisors and look for solutions that can
work across heterogeneous environments.
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5.  Virtualization and converged infrastructure have changed the conversation on
who is involved with storage decisions. VM admins have been voracious
consumers of shared storage and certainly have unique needs. While these
admins are important and growing in influence, Tintri must realize that the
enterprise IT structure will be slow to change and must not exclude targeting the
traditional storage admins as well.
LEARN MORE
Related Research
 Market Analysis Perspective: Worldwide Enterprise Virtualization Software, 2011
(IDC #232074, December 2011)
 Worldwide Storage and Virtualized x86 Environments 2011–2015 Forecast (IDC
#231080, November 2011)
 Worldwide Virtual Machine Software 2011–2015 Forecast (IDC #229434, August
2011)
 Worldwide Virtual Machine Software 2010 Vendor Shares (IDC #229442, August
2011)
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