Tintri, a provider of purpose-built, VM-aware storage platforms, announced a new release of their Tintri Operating System (OS).  To find out more and to get a little more background on the company, I reached out to Kieran Harty, the company's CEO and co-founder.   

VMblog:  Tell us a little about your background, and what led you to found Tintri?

Kieran Harty:  I previously oversaw R&D operations for VMware from 1999-2006. During this time, we developed all of VMware's initial server virtualization technology that's the basis of the software-defined data center. While virtualization brought about unprecedented benefits to the server side, it also had the unintended consequence of introducing new problems for storage.

Towards the end of my tenure at VMware, I began to think about ways to extend the benefits of virtualization from the server to storage, via a purpose-built file system that was tailored to the realities of virtualized infrastructures. That idea ultimately became Tintri, which was founded in 2008 and first shipped product in 2011.

VMblog:  Why did you choose to build a storage solution that's specifically intended for virtualized environments?

Harty:  Enterprise IT has experienced a radical shift in recent years, driven largely by the rise of virtualization. Organizations from across the board have embraced server and desktop virtualization for its ability to improve overall performance and cut down on power costs.

To underscore this fact, consider this: in 2008, 25% of enterprise applications were virtualized, considerable growth since the inception of server virtualization in the early 2000s. By 2012, though, that same figure had risen to over 60% - an astronomical growth figure for such a comparatively short time period.

This shift to virtualized infrastructure, while largely positive, has also posed new challenges for storage - a field that had previously been dominated by just a handful of large vendors for the better part of three decades. By and large, these vendors are still offering solutions that run on legacy architecture that fails to take advantage of recent technological innovations like flash.

According to IDC, the storage market for virtualized environments is currently over $10 billion - which offers hugely disruptive potential for an alternative storage solution.

The need for more intelligent storage that better understands the demands of virtualized environments will continue to grow due to the continued growth of virtualization and because of the advent of the software-defined datacenter.  As data center infrastructure moves to a more software-defined model, the common language will become that of virtualization, namely VMs, requiring new forms of data management and a move away from managing legacy storage attributes.

VMblog:  Talk a bit more about how 'legacy' vendors face a supposed disadvantage in this market.

Harty:  Simply put, their storage products were built for physical machines and ran - and still run, in most cases - on legacy architecture that quickly runs into serious hurdles in terms of both cost and complexity when confronted by the newer workloads brought about by virtual machines.

It's thus no surprise to see a new wave of storage solutions that take fundamentally different approaches to storage.  Virtualized infrastructures are fundamentally different than their physical predecessors, and thus have fundamentally different storage requirements. Traditional storage complexities like managing LUNs, tiers and volumes shouldn't be necessary in a virtualized environment, and only add complexity to managing storage.

VMblog:  So what makes Tintri different?

Harty:  Tintri is the first company to build a specialized storage system for virtual machines - what we describe as "VM-aware storage." Tintri VMstore, our flagship product, operates directly at the VM and vDisk level to provide a fast, simple storage solution that maps directly to how data center admins now view their world. We do so via a purpose-built file system that is designed for virtualization, combined with the use of flash, to eliminate performance bottlenecks, improve data management and simplify the overall storage infrastructure for virtualized environments.

We're extremely confident in our approach, and that confidence has been validated by the market response so far: in just under two years from initially shipping product, we have gained over 175 enterprise customers and experienced a 400% sales growth from Q4 2011 to Q4 2012.

VMblog:  Tell us about what's different in Tintri's second generation operating system, which was announced this week.

Harty:  Tintri OS 2.0 is all about enabling data center admins to fulfill the requirements of the so-called software-defined data center from the storage side.  To date, storage has been the laggard in this field, with the compute and networking both making more significant strides towards meeting the vision of a truly software-defined infrastructure.

Our new release introduces data management enhancements that allow you to manage VM-level data across globally distributed virtualized environments and takes the need for allocating VM distribution - one of the most tedious parts of managing storage - out of the equation. Additionally, this release allows per-VM replication, an industry first for array-side data replication. This builds upon Tintri's already established per-VM snapshot and cloning features.

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Thanks again to Kieran Harty, CEO and co-founder of Tintri, for taking time out to speak with VMblog.