The VM-aware storage vendor also announced new predictive analytics capabilities, nine new all-flash model options, and two new cloud offerings.

Mountain View CA-based storage vendor Tintri has announced a new scale-out storage platform with support for up to 160,000 VMs to support large private cloud infrastructures running diverse virtualized workloads. Related announcements included new predictive analytics capabilities, nine new models in the Tintri VMstore T5000 All-Flash Series, reflecting different new capacity options, and two new Tintri Cloud offerings.

“The new scale-out platform has two components to it,” said Chuck Dubuque, Senior Director, Product and Solution Marketing at Tintri. Not surprisingly, given Tintri’s overall focus on doing everything at the VM level, rather than the LUN level as had traditionally been the case with enterprise storage, as well as the VM-aware file system nature of their solution, one of these components is motivated by a desire to replicate an aspect of VMware’s design.

“Our VM scale-out software draws its inspiration from way VMware scales compute,” he said. “We want to do that same model of self optimization on the storage side.”

The scale-out software’s federated node design treats multiple Tintri VMstore appliances as one pool, regardless of their size and performance, and regardless of whether they are hybrid or all-flash, and with over 10 petabytes of capacity. It will also automatically provide the best placement recommendation for VMs.

“One thing customers have still had to do manually, is that if they were running out of space on one array, they would have to migrate them manually to another, and when they bought a new array they would have to figure out what to move,” Dubuque said. “This scale-out capability answers those questions. It keeps 30 days of historical data, and uses its algorithms to make least-cost recommendations. It’s a manual process at first – and can be configured to remain like that if that’s what the customer wants – but eventually twice a day it will look at algorithms and alert you with recommended actions with moving VMs from one VM to the other. This is also valuable when you initially populate a new array. Rather than figure out what to move when you have new storage, it will figure out what you should do.”

Tintri has always offered real-time, VM-level analytics as part of its Tintri Operating System and Tintri Global Center management system. The second new component now expands this to include a SaaS offering of predictive analytics that gives the ability to model both capacity and performance requirements, using big data engines like Apache Spark and Elastic Search.

“We think that about 80 per cent of our customers need this data,” Dubuque said. “Before the data would warn you if you were say, 80 per cent full, but this tells you things like when you will run out, or when you will hit a performance cliff.”

Further SaaS application modules are coming.

“We will add additional modules in the future at a pretty fast clip – like every couple weeks,” Dubuque said. “All these initial capabilities will be included as part of the maintenance contract. In the future, there may be some models we would add as add-ons where the customer would pay extra, but we haven’t figured that out yet.”

The announcement also includes nine new Tintri VMstore T5000 all flash models with capacity expansion capabilities.

“Our all-flash arrays have three different models, and we are introducing nine new models underneath them with different capacities,” Dubuque said. “These will range from starting at 17 TB to 308 TB on the largest T5080.

“We are switching to higher density drives, and each of the three base models now has a max capacity model and two smaller ones which can be doubled from an expansion capability,” he added. “This will let customers choose the right mix of capacity and performance, with the models being expandable if they don’t know what the right mix is today.”

Two new Tintri Cloud offerings were also announced. The Tintri Foundation Cloud scales out to 1.2 PB in as few as 8 rack units. The larger Tintri Ultimate Cloud delivers a 10 PB cloud-ready storage infrastructure for up to 160,000 VMs, delivering over 6.4 million IOPS in 64 RU. Both the Foundation Cloud and Ultimate Cloud include Tintri’s complete set of software offerings for storage management, VM-level analytics, VM Scale-out, replication, QoS, and lifecycle management.

VM Scale-out will be available through Tintri Global Center Advanced, which will be available in June 2016 as both a separate software license and a part of the Tintri Software Suite

Tintri Analytics is available immediately to customers with current Tintri VMstore support contracts.

The Tintri VMstore T5000 All-Flash Series with new capacity options is available now.

Tintri Foundation Cloud and Tintri Ultimate Cloud will be available for purchase in June 2016.