Tintri announced findings from a recent study by ESG, an IT analyst firm providing market intelligence and actionable insight to the global IT community, detailing end-user feedback that identifies optimal solutions for problems related to virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). The ESG study confirms that Tintri uniquely addresses VDI challenges and successfully delivers highly valuable, positive economic results with its VMstore storage technology. 

According to ESG, VDI environments can add a level of complexity related to IT architecture and planning, exacerbated by limited IT resources and a shortage of IT skills. 64% of the organizations surveyed described IT as being more complex today than just two years ago. As a result, the storage solutions supporting VDI do not always work as intended, making it difficult to achieve the desired levels of scalability, performance and cost control.

"To operate successfully in today's evolving business landscape, enterprises must have a simplified IT infrastructure optimized to deliver reliable access and performance for anytime-anywhere workforces, while simultaneously providing the necessary acumen to turn data into a competitive edge," said Alex Bouzari, CEO, Tintri. "Tintri intelligent storage solutions for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) are ideal for today's rapidly-changing businesses,  offering an efficient, secure and cost-effective end-user computing environment."

Leaving Behind an Unmanageable, Unscalable, Inefficient VDI Environment

ESG spoke with a VP of VDI architectural engineering who manages a global enterprise VDI environment and made the switch to Tintri VMstore because the previous storage environment was not sufficiently manageable, scalable or efficient. The company had considered using a public cloud storage service but determined that it would be cost-prohibitive.

Because VMstore provides autonomous, intelligent operations, this organization is now able to manage its VDI environment with existing employees. "Using Tintri meant one less thing that we would need to hire for...we can't hire 40 to 50 people," the VP said.  The organization currently has about 35,000 virtual desktops and is aiming to scale up to 60,000, and "when you scale at that level, it can get very expensive, very quickly."

The VP also stated that the cost savings provided was substantial in that Tintri was able "to beat what Microsoft and Amazon offered by a considerable amount ... equating to a couple of bucks per month per virtual machine." Overall, the VP reports that Tintri "has saved us a few million dollars for sure, not even including the cost for additional employees."

Seeing ‘Astounding Performance'

The lead IT solutions architect at a firm that provides technology services for the U.S. federal government also offered insight to ESG. The firm switched to Tintri VMstore because its prior solution's warranty was nearing expiration, and extending the warranty would be extremely expensive. The organization first turned to Tintri to reduce operating costs, but subsequently discovered that Tintri also provided a significant boost in performance. The IT architect said, "We did benchmark testing, and none of the alternatives came anywhere close to what Tintri was giving us." Performance on all the other solutions was at least 50% lower than what was achieved with Tintri systems.

For this organization, after two years of using Tintri, "it was like having free storage," the architect said. "We expanded our environment by leveraging those cost savings-scaling it for our company's next seven years of use and delivering a more robust environment. Now, instead of developers working on desktops that were struggling at best, they are tickled pink and happy. And we were able to do that just thanks to the cost savings from the maintenance fees alone."

"Tintri customers are true fans, and this was apparent throughout our interview process. During my conversations, Tintri customers were impressed by the savings and performance benefits of the technology," said Scott Sinclair, senior analyst, ESG. "Tintri has designed the VMstore system from the ground up to satisfy the demanding requirements of today's VDI environments. Through our conversations with numerous customers, it became clear that Tintri offers capabilities beyond that of more conventional storage systems."

VDI environments can be hampered by a lack of insight, analytics and overall intelligence. Another recent ESG study on the rise of Intelligent Infrastructure, focused on the benefits that storage infrastructure solutions with integrated intelligence can offer, highlighting ways to measure the value they deliver. As a leading Intelligent Infrastructure provider, Tintri helps organizations close the increasing gap between VDI growth and complexity on one hand, and the limited IT resources available to analyze and manage such environments on the other.

"Over the past few years there has been an explosion of data, and businesses simply don't have the resources to manage it.  What enterprises need is Intelligent Infrastructure," said Alex Bouzari, CEO and co-founder, DDN. "We are committed to continue delivering an innovation roadmap that provides unsurpassed value through Intelligent Infrastructure solutions and enables precious staff members to focus on their own innovation rather than IT management."

Through the insight gathered from these enterprise users, ESG identified several Tintri-specific differentiators that deliver benefits to those organizations and their VDI environments, including:

• High-performance, enterprise-grade, economical storage that possesses a combination of excellent operational characteristics and cost-efficiency.
• Generalist-friendly administration which avoids the need for storage expertise and can reduce the time to manage thousands of desktops to just minutes per month.
• Autonomous, real-time performance optimization that self-adjusts for VDI workloads,  automatically eliminates resource contention issues without admin intervention, and avoids over-provisioning of hardware.
• Accelerated operations that are marked by intelligent, real-time issue isolation and resolution, and predictive analytics for consistent VDI service performance and accurate capacity management-all of which reduce demand on IT, translating to lower costs and faster business results.
• Dynamic scalability that optimizes data placement and storage capacity without sacrificing performance or management simplicity.