TINTRI VMSTORE Zero Management Storage DECEMBER 2013

TECHNOLOGY VALIDATION. TINTRI VMSTORE Zero Management Storage DECEMBER 2013 Storage challenges in the virtual infrastructure are tremendous. Virtualization consolidates more IO than ever before, and then obscures the sources of that IO so that end-to-end visibility and understanding become next to impossible. As the storage practitioner labors on with business-as-usual, deploying yet more storage and fighting fires attempting to keep up with demands, the business is losing the battle around trying to do more with less. The problem is that inserting the virtual infrastructure in the middle of the application-to-storage connection, and then massively expanding the virtual infrastructure, introduces a tremendous amount of complexity. A seemingly endless stream of storage vendors are circling this problem today with an apparent answer – storage systems that deliver more performance. But more “bang for the buck” is too often just an attempt to cover up the lack of an answer for complexity-induced management inefficiency – ranging across activities like provisioning, peering into utilization, troubleshooting performance problems, and planning for the future. With an answer to this problem, one vendor has been sailing to wide spread adoption, and leaving a number of fundamentally changed enterprises in their wake. That vendor is Tintri, and they’ve focused on changing the way storage is integrated and used, instead of just tweaking storage performance. Tintri integrates more deeply with the virtual infrastructure than any other product we’ve seen, and creates distinct advantages in both storage capabilities and on-going management. Taneja Group recently had the opportunity to put Tintri’s VMstore array through a hands-on exercise, to see for ourselves whether there’s mileage to be had from a virtualization-specific storage solution. Without doubt, there is clear merit to Tintri’s approach. A virtualization specific storage system can reinvent a broad range of storage management interactions – by being VM-aware – and fundamentally alter the complexity of the virtual infrastructure for the better. In our view, these changes stand to have massive impact on the TCO of virtualization initiatives (some of which are identified in the table of highlights below) but the story doesn’t end there. At the same time they’ve fundamentally changed management, Tintri has also innovated around storage technology that enables Tintri VMstore to serve up storage beneath even the most extreme virtual infrastructures. On the technology front, Tintri sports a flash-first architecture that deduplicates and compresses data stored on solid-state storage to make it go further, alongside a sophisticated QoS approach that couples intelligent insight into per-VM IO patterns with algorithms that guarantee fair-service even among a multitude of VMs and the most contentious IO. Meanwhile, Tintri is uniquely VM-aware, and can apply these technologies in the right time and place by understanding things like where metadata should be stored for maximum performance and capacity efficiency. But Tintri is more than just either one of these single management or technology dimensions of innovation. The innovations in these two areas are inseparably intertwined with Tintri, and that’s what makes the difference. In essence, with an architecture that guarantees VM performance, Tintri reduces storage interaction to the point that it almost disappears, and every storage operation suddenly becomes just a VM operation – you no longer manage a data store, just VMs. And those VMs Copyright The TANEJA Group, Inc. 2011. All Rights Reserved. 1 of 24 87 Elm Street, Suite 900 Hopkinton, MA 01748 T: 508.435.2556 F: 508.435.2557 www.tanejagroup.com Technology Validation are now wrapped with serious storage capability. vSphere storage operations may look to have full utility, but in reality they come with a long list of serious limitations – including performance penalties, and limitations like requiring snapshot consolidation during any clone event. With Tintri VMstore, those operations become seamlessly integrated with the hardware power of an accelerated storage array, and make possible more efficient, higher speed storage features that can radically reduce space consumption and the time and effort associated with storage tasks. Arguably, this is the way it should be. In a VM-centric world, storage provisioning automatically happens, and the VM becomes the building block. Since the storage system is no longer a distinct entity that must be managed, this allows Tintri to function as a virtual infrastructure building block with almost no overhead, no matter how many Tintri VMstore arrays are involved. On top of this, emerging technologies like Tintri’s Global Center are poised to reshape Tintri management at scale into an even greater advantage. While we did not specifically review it here, Global Center is Tintri’s new solution and architecture for managing many Tintri systems (up to 32 VMstores per Global Center in the first version) while preserving all of the VM level insight and analytics that were responsible for the clearly differentiated Tintri management capabilities in this exercise. The Tintri VMstore is as close to truly zero management storage as we have ever seen. More importantly, as we’ll discuss in this report, the impacts are significant enough that we think every business should be considering what Tintri and virtualization-specific storage can do for TCO. Highlights from Validating Tintri VMstore Performance: Observed mixed 6X better than typical Delivering 60,000 to 75,000 IOPS per 3U R/W Performance per VMstore mid-range storage building block, Tintri’s flash-first architecture systems with SSD. delivers superior performance density over typical performance-accelerated traditional storage systems, even when they sport mixed SSD/HDD configurations. Capacity Advantage 6X or better capacity At 4.5TB usable storage per rack unit, Tintri than typical mid-range sets a high bar for storage density behind storage of similar the virtual infrastructure. (And a new T650 performance increases this to 8.4TB usable per U) Routine Management Time and 52X advantage Tintri, even at scale, can reduce annual time Effort at Scale – hypothetical spent on deployment and provisioning to estimation of 8,000 VMs minutes, versus weeks for storage made up of traditional arrays. Estimated time to troubleshoot Minutes versus days VM IO intelligence and end-to-end path typical virtual infrastructure insight allows administrators to drill down performance problems into individual workload demands and utilization, and immediately pinpoint problems, even if they are in the hypervisor or network. Our estimated annual 60X reduction In-depth, end-to-end virtual infrastructure management time and effort visibility and consistent ease of use vastly impact from Tintri storage simplify virtual storage administration, yielding a distinctly different management approach versus traditional storage Table 1: Highlights from our hands-on testing of Tintri’s VMstore touching on both core storage capabilities in the virtual infrastructure, and management efficiencies. Copyright The TANEJA Group, Inc. 2011. All Rights Reserved. 2 of 24 87 Elm Street, Suite 900 Hopkinton, MA 01748 T: 508.435.2556 F: 508.435.2557 www.tanejagroup.com Technology Validation THE VIRTUAL STORAGE CHALLENGE – IT’S (MOSTLY) ABOUT MANAGEMENT We’ve been on a multi-decade firefight to address performance and basic storage capabilities – things like ensuring sufficient performance and availability, protecting data in place, and scaling storage capacity. But today, when these capabilities are acceptably delivered by a storage system, it readily becomes apparent the industry is still neglecting a key dimension – storage management. Worse yet, storage management is an enormous challenge that makes these other more fundamental storage capabilities look simple. Storage management ranges from the seemingly straightforward – storage array deployment – to more daunting tasks like managing performance demands or troubleshooting storage fabric problems. And it is that complexity that is largely responsible for vendors ignoring storage management, or relegating it to massive management frameworks that are more complex than the problems they are meant to address. Moreover, the challenge of storage management is exacerbated by several characteristics of the virtual infrastructure. - Rapid, easy provisioning means that workloads often come and go, changing storage demands, connections, and interactions. - Mobility means that workloads may shift from place to place, moving dependencies and changing storage-to-application relationships and making insight and reporting difficult, if not almost impossible. - The virtual infrastructure obscures storage interactions and dependencies by injecting a layer of abstraction – the VMFS datastore – that obscures the relationships and interactions between the workload and the storage system. All of these factors work together to create a complex web of storage connectivity, interactions, and dependencies. This can make virtual infrastructure storage management exceedingly Storage challenges - centering on burdensome. In the face of this management - often disrupt burden, organizations often planned savings become far less agile and capable than they imagined they would be OpEx Savings when stepping into the realm of Total Cost of Ownership virtualization. Worse yet, the Cost management requirements cut into anticipated

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