Following the announcement of their new high-end enterprise cloud platform earlier this month, Tintri now announces availability of a much smaller 10 TB system, aimed at smaller deployments within – and quite possibly outside – the enterprise.

Earlier this month, Mountain View CA-based store vendor Tintri   released their new EC6000 flagship enterprise cloud platform, with immense scalability up to 40 TB. Today, Tintri is announcing a new product with a very different role. The new T1000 all flash systems are aimed at departmental use cases and Remote Office/Branch Office [ROBO] deployments. However, while Tintri strongly badges itself as an enterprise player, they also acknowledge some of these channel-only products will be sold by their channel into the SMB space.

“Our software is exactly the same across all our platforms, and the ability to create scale-out pools of storage is consistent,” said Chuck Dubuque, Tintri’s VP of Product Marketing. “While we are selling the T1000 to enterprises, they fit very specific use cases, around enterprise ROBO and departmental use.  They are very much a departmental product for customers who want to use Tintri outside of the core data centre.

Accordingly, despite the same software and user interface, the T1000 is different from the data centre models, While the EC6000 scales up to 645 TB, the T1000 has a maximum capacity of 109 TB of flash and is not expandable. While the EC6000 series has capacities that ship as partly populated shells, to allow for upgrades, the T1000 ships fully-populated. While the T1000 supports up to 100 VMs, Dubuque said that around 50 will be more common.

On the other hand, the T1000 has specific strengths that make it ideal for ROBO and departmental deployments, which will be lighter on IT.

“It is designed to be easy to consume,” Dubuque said. It can be deployed in under 30 minutes and managed by a generalist.

The T1000 also has the same backup capabilities to Tintri, third party storage systems, or the public cloud as the data centre models. It has the same real-time analytics as well, and the ability to eliminate overprovisioning by modelling need for storage and compute 18 months into the future.

“It also comes with the software and a year of support,” Dubuque said.

Dubuque also acknowledged that while Tintri clearly defines itself as an enterprise vendor, and its partners are by definition capable of selling into the enterprise, many of the T1000s will likely find homes elsewhere, particularly since Tintri has defined them as a channel-exclusive offering.

“From a corporate standpoint we target the enterprise,” he said. “But this is purely a product for partners. Our own direct people won’t be selling it. We expect some partners would sell it into highly virtualized environments where it would be a good fit even for high end of the SMB.”

The Tintri T1000 with prepackaged replication and security software is available now. Software that supports advanced remote management capabilities will be available in Q4.