Tintri T850: Storage array demonstrates stiff upper lip under pressure The Tintri T850 is Tintri's mid-line offering. It is a great example of the current line of Tintri products. Reviewing it has been something of a challenge, though that is the fault of your reviewer, not the storage array. Tintri focuses on intelligent storage that analyses your workloads and predicts what your workloads are …
Would love to see El Reg take two pizza trays and a shared, passive enclosure of rust and flash, bang 2012 R2 on it and manage using storage spaces, presenting as SMB / NFS / iSCSI.
Use the dedupe and auto tiering features.
Doesn't sound a million miles from a lot of new storage nodes these days and something I'm interested in... Roll your own auto-tiering, deduping SAN
We did a PoC for a large Hyper-V deployment using Storage Spaces a while back and it was not spectacular - for about 70% of the workloads it worked well, but the outlying 30% experienced weird latency and performance issues - and these spikes would impact other resources. Bear in mind the solution was spec'd and configured by Microsoft professional services resources - not by us ourselves. They could never get it to work quite right and the extra time spent pushed our own implementation schedule back a ways so we finally had to pull the plug on it.
The reasoning was sound and the same as Trevor's - these are Windows admins managing the environment, not storage admins. Windows storage seemed a good fit. When you support 500 desktops and 200 servers with 5 staff you don't have time to become an expert in everything so sometimes the simplest thing that does the job is the best.
I did. It didn't know what the VMs were inside it's UI, but otherwise allowed me to do what I need. It shouldn't be hard to add the more complete capability, but for the moment, it just treats KVM VMs the same as it does, for example, an .ISO file loaded up via NFS.
NFS is NFS is NFS, really. Everything else is the unit going "oh, hey, I know what that file is, let's present it in a friendly way".
What they officially support and what works are two totally different things. Official support is pretty limited and restricted to VM workloads only. What actually works is more or less what you'd expect from a compliant NFS datastore.
That said, you should always stick with what's officially supported. If only for CYA in case of emergency.
NFS is not just NFS :)
NFS as understood by most vendors is NFSv3 which sucks bricks sidewise through a thin straw. It is a 20 years old protocol from the days before every second process had an embedded database and was flock()ing it several times a second. When you read the benchmarks small print nearly all of them are v3 and some arrays do not support v4 at all or do not support key features. They are all also highly synthetic because the key performance hurdle in v3 is not locking and that frankly has nothing to do with the array - it is more of a network issue.
NFSv4 is an entirely different ball game. The locking and auth are completely different and array comes to play big time, there are differences in how it is cached, etc. Considering that NFSv4 benchmarks (if available) are usually not published by vendors it will be quite interesting to see some testing done by a professional. If the array supports v4 in the first place.
Voland:
NFSv4 sucks rocks at the moment due to the variety of implementations -- even within a single vendor. <CertainXemployer> has NFSv4 heads available for <SorryVexingChoices> that is not compliant with NFSv4 in their own OS, or for that matter any other implementation of NFSv4 that I've run into. Try building your cloud data implementation on that hot mess of metal and wire and misaligned protocols.
Thanks Trevor, I'll add this to the lab wish list if I get to build that out.....
Satinder Sharma from Tintri here -
Just want to add to Trevor's comment here that deep integration with KVM depends upon the flavour. Tintri has the same integration as VMware in terms of analytics, QoS and other functionality with the Redhat version of KVM. Apart from that the VMstore also supports Hyper-V and Openstack in the same fashion.
@storarch
I used three of the first-gen T540's and one T880 at my previous workplace. The T540's ran production Oracle and SQL databases, BI systems, RDS farms, production apps, and 200+ VDI desktops without breaking a sweat. Snapshots and cloning are a breeze and those features integrate with vCenter. Tintri has a scripting environment as well for bulk VM cloning, snapshotting, replicating, etc. My favorite part was the super fast setup time and near-zero administrative effort required to maintain them. They smoked Netapp all day long for a fraction of the price and hassle.
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