A distinct feature of the new Tintri series is the ability to do non-disruptive drive-by-drive expansion, since most of the series configurations ship with only partly populated boxes.

Mountain View CA-based Tintri has released its new flagship enterprise cloud platform. The new Tintri EC6000 systems provide for extreme scalability, scaling from 19TB to 40PB and being capable of managing up to 480,000 virtual machines on the same operating system and management platform.

“The EC 6000 series is our new core enterprise cloud product,” said Chuck Dubuque, Tintri’s VP of Product Marketing. “It’s an all-flash, 2 rack unit designed for faster performance on the high end. The EC6900, the high end of the series, will drive 7500 VMs, up from 5000 on our previous high end model, the T5000. It has a top IOPS performance of 320,000, up from 200,000 in that previous model.”

The Tintri EC6000 series has four models –  the EC6030, EC6050, EC6070 and EC6090 – each supporting a range of capacities. At the series’ low end, the EC6030 starts at 19 TB and goes up to 81 TB. The EC6090, at the other end of the spectrum, starts at 77 TB and scales to 645 TB.

One unique feature of the EC6000 series is that most of the capacities will ship as partly populated shells. For example, the EC6030 has four different configurations, two of which are half-populated and two fully-populated.

“A 2U rack holds 24 drives, but most capacities only take up 13 slots,” Dubuque said. “As a result, we are introducing drive by drive expansion with this platform. You will be able to expand dynamically with as little as one drive at a time if you want to, adding a single drive at a time until you fill up the box. The goal here for customers is to make it easy to max out both capacity and performance.” The addition of new drives is non-disruptive to the system.

Dubuque noted that while enterprise customers are more likely to buy new drives chunks rather than one at a time, service providers in particular like the ability to pay as they go.

“That level of granularity is very attractive to them,” he said. “Partners also like this, because they prefer to have the opportunity to granularly dial in the amount of capacity that they sell.”

This is also the first Tintri platform that supports 40 GB Ethernet.

“We do have some customers who are doing 40 GB today, although for most of them it is more about future proofing,” Dubuque said.

Improved technology also makes the EC6000 series more cost-effective than its predecessor.

“The EC6000 series has new 3D NAND technology and high-density drives, which are less expensive, so for the same capacity, it will have a lower list price than the T5000,” Dubuque said.

While the T5000 remains still available for sale, he acknowledged most customers will want the new platform.

“Our software is exactly the same across all the platforms, and the ability to create scale-out pools of storage is consistent,” Dubuque added. The Tintri VM Scale-out capability can treat up to 64 systems as one federated pool of storage managed through a single pane of glass, without the need to capable them together. In theory, this could extend to 20,000,000 IOPS, 40PB of effective capacity and 480,000 virtual machines.”

Tintri’s sweet spot is mid-sized to large enterprises, which include 21 of the Fortune 100. They have about 1400 enterprise customers worldwide.

The Tintri EC6000 series is available now. Drive-by-drive expansion will be available to all EC6000 customers in calendar Q4.