The new enhancements make multiple software-based upgrades to the Tintri platform.

Mountain View CA-based storage vendor Tintri has announced the extension of their enterprise cloud platform to Amazon Web Services and IBM Cloud Object Storage. They also announced updates to their platform that add predictive analytics around compute, complementing the storage analytics introduced last year.

“This announcement is all about our software innovation on our platform,” said Chuck Dubuque, Tintri’s VP of Product Marketing. “There are a couple of different pieces designed to help customers build and expand enterprise private clouds.”

The new cloud integrations are facilitated by the Tintri Cloud Connector, a new interface between Tintri’s on-premises Tintri enterprise cloud infrastructure with the AWS and IBM cloud resources, creating the foundation for hybrid cloud services.

“This expands the data protection story for Tintri,” Dubuque said. “We have already been able to store 120 live snapshots of a virtual machine and run back and forth without any loss or commitment. Usually if you go back, you lose forward snaps. What’s new with this is that now we can send snapshots off to AWS or IBM as part of the overall strategy. It’s also easy to set up a policy for a single VM or group of VMs, defining how long they are kept. It’s all visible and manageable at the VM level or group of VM level, because we do everything at the VM level.”

That Tintri would start its cloud integrations with market leader AWS is no surprise. The choice of IBM’s cloud over Azure as the other initial supported cloud might raise some eyebrows, but Dubuque said that it makes sense given Tintri’s customer base.

“We may in the future look at expanding our list, but this is what our customers told us they wanted first,” he said. “The IBM cloud had a fairly large install base before it was acquired, when it was Cleversafe and a lot of our customers use that. Most of our customers also have an S3 account. Azure comes up a lot, but we haven’t announced anything in terms of support, and will be guided there by customer requests.”

The other half of the announcement is Tintri Analytics adding compute analytics to its existing storage predictive analytics planning capabilities.

“This is something we are really excited about,” Dubuque said. “We started with a strong foundation in virtualization analytics, which is what customers really care about. That has been a part of our platform since the beginning. Last year we introduced Tintri Analytics, a new application, which looks at up to three years of data and projects storage requirements into the future. That has become a very powerful feature, which has been popular with both customers and partners because of the data It provides on usage trends.

“Now we are adding compute analytics,” Dubuque continued. “With vSphere hypervisors, not only will we provide VM usage of storage, which we have already done, but how much compute, memory and other resources they are using. We will also project it forward from 3 to 18 months, based on past trends.”

The analytics platform is part of the Tintri services contract. The compute capacity will start in September, and will require an update to the Tintri OS on the hardware platform to collect the data. That requires a non-disruptive upgrade.

The new enhancements have direct benefits for channel partners.

“We have already seen great acceptance of storage analytics in helping make more informed decisions, and provide proof and graphs that customers can take to their purchasing environment,” Dubuque said. “Being able to do that on the compute side is a win-win for partners to sell compute hardware as well

“Most partners also guide customers to a multi-cloud environment, even when they don’t sell AWS or Cleversafe directly,” he continued. “Most resellers help customers find the right cloud for the right workloads. So being able to take advantage of those clouds is a powerful thing.”

Dubuque also noted some additional enhancements.

“We are continuing to invest in scalability and ease of use, and have updated management tools to enable talking to 64 Tintri arrays instead of 32,” he said. “We do a lot of things to make storage not act like storage from a usability and scale-out point of view, such as not having to scale out in matched pairs and with a lot of complexity. Our goal is to make storage as easy to use as virtualization.”

In addition, Tintri multitenancy support now includes hard quotas for logical capacity for multiple tenants in an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) environment. This includes tenant separation, data encryption, service assurance and per-VM analytics for chargeback.

Tintri Analytics with Compute Analytics will be available in fiscal Q3 of Tintri’s 2018 fiscal year [September] to new Tintri customers and existing Tintri customers with a current Tintri support contract.

“If they already have Tintri Software Suite they get access to Cloud Connector in the same timeframe,” Dubuque said. Tintri has been selling it for about 18 months and it’s included with new systems. If they don’t have the software suite, it’s also available as an a-la-carte software offering.