The Tintri Flash-Based Architecture

The Tintri VMstore appliance is designed from scratch to fully exploit flash technology for virtual environments.

The custom Tintri OS is specifically designed to ensure robust data integrity, reliability and durability in flash, and operates at the virtualization layer (more on this later). MLC flash is a key technology that enables Tintri to meet the intense random IO required to aggregate hundreds or even thousands of VMs on a single appliance. The Tintri OS leverages flash in several ways:

• Cost-efficiency By design, nearly all active data will live exclusively in flash. To maximize flash usage, Tintri combines fast inline dedupe and compression with file system intelligence that automatically moves only cold data to SATA.
• Latency managementTintri employs sophisticated patent- pending technology to eliminate both the write amplification and latency spikes characteristic of MLC flash Technology.This approach delivers consistent sub-millisecond latency from costeffective MLC flash.
• Flash durability: Tintri uses an array of technologies including deduplication, compression, advanced transactional and garbage collection techniques, combined with SMART (Self- Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) monitoring of flash devices to intelligently maximize the durability of MLC flash.

The Virtualization and Storage Mismatch

Virtualization introduces an element of simplicity and agility the physical world lacks, with a single view of resources under hypervisor control (CPU, memory, and networking resources). However, there is a language barrier.

Virtualization owes its success in transforming data centers with the powerful virtual machine (VM) abstraction. An application in a virtual infrastructure is for the first time, a truly logical object. Virtual applications can be copied, reconfigured, redeployed, analyzed, and managed in ways that are difficult for physical machines. Virtualization provides not just the benefits of server and desktop consolidation but also simplifies data-center management, deployment, and maintenance.

Instant Bottleneck Visualization

Administrators dread troubleshooting storage performance problems.

A VM complaint may be due to a problem with the storage, but how do you verify this when the VM is sharing a LUN with a dozen other VMs, and the LUN is a slice of a RAID array that contains many other LUNs? Unfortunately, the legacy array provides no statistics on a per-VM basis. The problem could have roots in the ESX host or the storage network, or even the user’s application. Identifying performance bottlenecks is a time consuming, frustrating and sometimes inconclusive process that requires iteratively gathering data, analyzing the data to form a hypothesis, and testing. In large enterprises, this process often involves coordination between several people and departments and can span many days or even weeks.

VM Alignment

VM alignment is the daunting to-do item.

It is a problem that poses real challenges as virtualization spreads into more mainstream workloads. Misaligned VMs magnify IO requests, consuming extra IOPS on the storage array. At a small scale, the impact is small. However, the impact snowballs as the environment grows with a single array supporting hundreds of VMs. At this size, performance impact estimates range from 10 percent to more than 30 percent.

Granular and Scalable Snapshots

Legacy shared storage architectures provide snapshots of storage objects, such as LUNs and volumes, rather than VMs.

These snapshot technologies lead to inefficient storage utilization as hundreds of VMs with varying change rates are often snapshotted at once. Snapshot schedules can only be set at a LUN, or a volume level, leading to such best practices recommendations as creating one LUN per VM as a work around for the need to create individualized snapshot schedules at per VM level.

Tintri ReplicateVM

Unique to Tintri VMstore, ReplicateVM enables administrators to apply protection policies to individual VMs, rather than to arbitrary units of storage such as volumes or LUNs.

eplicateVM efficiently replicates the deduplicated and compressed snapshots of VMs from one Tintri VMstore to another. Replication can be dedicated to specific network interfaces, and optionally throttled to limit the rate of replication when replicating snapshots between Tintri VMstore appliances located in datacenters connected over wide-area networks.The power of ReplicateVM comes clearly into view when administrators realize the power they can wield by rightclicking on a VM and then quickly and easily establishing a protective snapshot and replication policy on each VM or VMs as-needed. Protection policies are applied to database server VMs running applications like Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft Exchange. Distributing “Gold” (master/parent) VM images used to create Desktop Pools for VMware Horizon View or VM Catalogs for XenDesktop VDI deployments enables multi-site HA for VDI.