The Tintri collaboration provides a packaged replication service for higher tier disaster recovery needs. It will be available through Neverfail partners, and will likely be able to be sold by Tintri partners too.

VM-aware storage vendor Tintri and cloud service provider Neverfail have announced a new partnership. The companies have collaborated on a comprehensive Disaster Recovery as a Service [DRaaS] platform built on Tintri’s all-flash storage solution.

Neverfail – the company was known as Artisan Infrastructure until it rebranded in 2016 around one of their solution areas with a snappier name – already had a business continuity emphasis, but the Tintri partnership adds a new dimension to it.

“Part of the Neverfail rationale for rebranding was because of our 100 per cent uptime SLA,” said Jeremy Bigler, Neverfail’s Chief Strategy Officer. “It provides a focus on a continuity practice that’s holistic. This is another way to let customers have DRaaS functionality for each tier of their service stack.”

Bigler said that traditionally, Neverfail had been a channel-first company, so their services had originally been ‘do-it-yourself’ services that partners could construct and customize to customers’ specific requirements.

“We increasingly began to see the industry desiring a more utility-based and service-based consumption model,” he indicated. “So we have changed direction from that ‘do it yourself’ model, and moved into more of a true as-a-service solution, which organizations can consume back into the Neverfail data centre in a true services model.”

Neverfail offers multiple flavours of availability services, however.

“We have  been very successful in the channel with our continuity engine as a service – but that may only impact the top 5-8 per cent of application inventory,” Bigler said. “This solution with Tintri has broader applicability.”

The Tintri solution also complements one that Neverfail has with Veeam.

“The Veeam solution is snapshot-based data protection, and fits with a lower tier disaster recovery strategy,” Bigler indicated. “The solution with Tintri is a true replication solution, with much finer-tuned recovery objectives.”

Tintri hasn’t made this kind of solution available before on its own hardware, but they have had customers ask them about it.

“We get a lot of requests from customers how they can better their disaster recovery plan,” said Chris Colotti, Field CTO at Tintri. “It comes up in scenarios like when they are consolidating centres. They need a partner for the DR component, and it makes natural sense to do DRaaS with a partner that does Tintri natively.”

Colotti said that the partnership actually came about because a mutual customer of Tintri and Neverfail brought the parties together.

“They wanted to leverage Tintri replication within someone else’s data centre as-a-service,” he indicated.

The joint solution connects Tintri storage solutions at customer sites with a Tintri T5000 at Neverfail’s data centre, to allow data to be quickly replicated and restored to Neverfail’s private cloud and data centre.

“It was a perfect catalyst,” Bigler said, referring to the customer needs that led to the solution’s generation. “The customer’s functional requirements demanded storage level replication. The Tintri architecture’s ability to allow orchestration of storage at a VM level, which is relatively unique in the marketplace, facilitated this. Tintri and their disruptive VM-based management and administration complements Neverfail’s unfettered administrative access into VCenter well. It lets us spin up individual businesses’ processes without having to do anything unnatural and complex.”

“The API stack within our storage array allowed Neverfail to automate a lot of operations,” Colotti noted. “Without that, it would have been a lot more difficult. The virtual machine synergies, combined with the API aspect, took a lot of the steps out of the playbook.”

“The ability for the end user to have a high level of automation in continuity is a utopia that many of our customers and partners are looking for, which this solution delivers,” Bigler added.

“Now that the solution is in place, our field team as well as partners are excited,” Colotti said. “We already have customers asking about it.”

The joint offering will go to market through Neverfail, but while it is not yet a Tintri SKU, the plan is to get to the point where Tintri partners are able to sell it.

“We want to take this out through our current partner channel,” Bigler said. “However, we have white-labelling and other capabilities, and working with Tintri, we want to enable the Tintri channel to offer this as an upsell to both existing and net-new prospects.”

This is Neverfail’s first vendor partnership aimed at more advanced replication needs, and it is unlikely to be the last.

“This is our entrée into this type of continuity architecture, with the Tintri architecture,” Bigler said. “However, our vision is to pull other storage architectures into our DRaaS solution.”