Examining Our Roots
Tintri has consistently endeavored to craft products infused with passion and character—products that our customers love. Our technology epitomizes simplicity, dependability, and effortlessness, empowering users to operate with profound efficiency. We are driven by an unwavering commitment to address our customers’ greatest challenges in their virtualized environments with purpose-built solutions.
Our unique approach has sometimes led observers to categorize us as “niche” as we purposefully hone our focus on solving our customers’ challenges in their virtual infrastructure. In fact, customers repeatedly tell us that this laser focus is precisely what sets our technology apart and allows our products to seamlessly integrate into their environments, delivering unmatched value. If being recognized as “niche” is a consequence of our dedication, we proudly embrace it. Let’s recount how we got here.
Defining VM-aware
It all started in 2008 with the realization that new infrastructure constructs – some of which our founders were involved in creating – were misaligned with traditional physical paradigms. This discrepancy was particularly true in the storage realm where legacy constructs had been grafted onto virtual environments as-is, with no thought as to how much better things could be if they were instead purpose-built for the virtual paradigm. Tintri was born from this novel concept and ventured a unique approach to servicing virtual elements in a post-physical infrastructure world. Our focus was on natively servicing the modern units of infrastructure, the objects themselves: Virtual Machines (VMs). It was a radical departure from anything that has preceded it, but we felt it was the optimal path forward and opened new realms of possibilities for our customers. Core principles evolved from this re-thinking and underly everything we have done and still do today.
Tintri began with the belief that the modern unit of infrastructure is the Virtual Machine (VM) object. We built a platform from the ground up that natively service VMs as the key elemental unit of virtual infrastructure, giving our customers a much better way to manage their virtual environments. We enable administration and control of everything at the VM level eliminating the need to manage legacy constructs like LUNS or Volumes, necessary remnants in a physically driven infrastructure. This allows us to provide value in all the things an administrator no longer has to do.
We soon discovered that focusing on the infrastructural object (a VM in this case) as well as the entire infrastructure, not just at the storage layer, enabled us to service that object in new ways with unique benefits. By intimately knowing the storage resources that are consumed by each VM, we can provide a dynamic view of every VM to administrators, allowing them to plan performance capacity at the granularity of a VM. By tracking each IO across the hypervisor host, across the network, and to our storage allows us to better service the VM. A powerful example: enabling an administrator to visually pinpoint where latency lies within the infrastructure in real-time. We often found that what administrators thought was a “storage problem” was actually rooted in the host or networking elements and hiding in a blind spot. This led to the development of our visualization features that clearly identify where bottlenecks lie outside of storage. Without being able to see IO flows across the entire infrastructure, it is a daunting (if not impossible) task to pinpoint where a bottleneck truly resides. Our unique approach makes it effortless.
Mastering Simplicity
Simplicity is another key foundational principle. Easy to say, much harder to achieve; simplicity is not simple. To that end, we work relentlessly for our customers to infuse simplicity into every element of the product experience. We built an appliance that effortlessly plugs into an existing environment and can be fully configured, up and running, and serving VMs in minutes. Did I mention no provisioning of LUNs or volumes? Following deployment, customers continuously tout how truly “set and forget” our technology is and rarely touch it again outside of reporting or adding additional capacity.
Our VM-centric approach enables effortless simplicity in operations as well: instantly clone a VM, replicate a VM, snapshot a VM, and sync data between VMs and even disks of VMs. No consideration of legacy sub elements necessary. All operations can be achieved with just a few clicks! If automation is desired, all these operations (and more) can be accessed by deep and powerful APIs.
Inevitably, customers’ environments grow. We have been obsessed with finding ways to simplify that experience. “Drive-by-drive” expansion is one example. Today, an administrator can easily model the effect of additional expansion drives on their Tintri appliance and ascertain at a single drive level how many expansion-drives they need to meet their projected growth. These projections are all based on the customers’ own data that is already sitting on their appliance. Once the expansion drive(s) are in hand, a single click from the UI adds the drive(s); they’re all available for use in less than a minute. No downtime. Nothing more needed.
Embracing Our Future
Over the last 15 years, we have learned. A lot. At inception, we built in sophisticated call-home facilities with granularity down to the objects (and sub objects) we serve. We have relentlessly analyzed that data, transforming it into knowledge and wisdom, gaining deep understanding of how our product performs in a wide variety of real-world environments. We continually use those learnings to refine and improve our technology.
Furthermore, as we amassed trillions of data points, we realized it could be incredibly useful if we processed the information in an effective way for our customers. Tintri Analytics was born. Tintri Analytics allows a customer to see three years of detailed workload trending, giving them unprecedented insights into their virtual environments. With the application of AI technology, we allow customers to not only plan and model storage and performance capacity for their Tintri appliance(s) but also plan and model compute resources for their virtual environments.
Looking forward, object level and environment data we have collected will be further leveraged as we continue to give our customers a highly differentiated experience. VMs were just the beginning. As the technology landscape has evolved, we have learned that additional “modern virtual infrastructural units” – things like databases and containers – can also benefit from this approach.
Tintri stands at the forefront of innovation. Driven by a rich history of embracing our “niche” identity, our passionate commitment to simplicity and innovative customer-centric solutions remains unwavering. We are poised to build on our success, leveraging everything we have learned over the past 15 years to further enhance and reimagine the Tintri experience. The journey continues far beyond VMs as we embrace new modern virtual infrastructural units.
Thrilling opportunities for innovation lie ahead as Tintri pushes onward in our journey pioneering the future of storage and modern data infrastructure.
