Tintri pushes for cloud and container storage with Tintri.io

Tintri has announced a big push to the cloud, which will see a supplier that started life as “VM-aware” storage aim to provide on-demand capacity for the containers and microservices era of application deployment.

Tintri.io will be Tintri’s storage in the cloud, with availability in AWS planned for December, Microsoft Azure in February 2023 and Google Cloud Platform in Q2 of 2023.

The announcements come as part of Tintri’s “next” and “Virtual Series” strategy branding, marking a push to the cloud with a heavy emphasis on microservices-based application deployment, based around Kubernetes and VMware’s Tanzu container management platform.

“Kubernetes etc are just workload schedulers, like Tivoli job controller was in the 1980s,” said Phil Trickovic, senior vice-president at Tintri. “What we’re aiming for is pay-as-you-use across the stack, but we’re not there yet.”

Tintri began life selling “VM-aware” storage hardware nodes, in which its claim to uniqueness lay in not using block storage LUNs, but provisioned capacity to VMs as separate datastores. It has a core appliance-based product offer, with the latest in the T7000 series announced in February as an all-NVMe on-premise hardware appliance line and Tintri’s eighth hardware generation.

Now, said Trickovic, the aim is that Tintri goes from being VM-aware to being containers-aware and eventually application-aware, with storage that is built to provide capacity in the optimum way for these ways of working.

“It’s three to five years down the road, but what we want to offer is that you only pay for the virtual machine as you use it,” he said.

Tintri.io – which has so far only been available internally or as a requested customer demo – will be available via a cloud provider catalogue. Different service levels are likely, but the company couldn’t commit to that now.

The company envisages Tintri.io will not be used for high-value tier one workloads but mostly as secondary storage and data protection, including backups, replication and snapshots, which can also offer file-level restores on-site or in the cloud.

Ransomware threats are also addressed with algorithm-driven scans for suspicious activity with systems or parts of systems quarantined while investigations are carried out.

Kubernetes support will be on a limited basis for the time being. Tintri doesn’t have its own ratified CSI drivers, but these are expected in mid-2023 or early 2024. The company does, however, have full support in VMware Tanzu.

“Tanzu is where the market is,” said Trickovic. “We are in close collaboration with our customers and partners, and understand the challenges they continue to face as data and application implementation becomes more distributed. Because of our unique architecture meant specifically for virtual data sets, we are perfectly positioned to meet these new customer challenges.”

Tintri was originally formed in 2008 and gained its first prominence initially during the big waves of server virtualisation in the early 2010s. By the end of the decade, however, it had slumped. In 2018 – following an IPO – the company ran out of cash and filed for bankruptcy. It was acquired by Data Direct Networks in 2018 and now forms part of DDN.