DDN has injected its all-NVMe flash storage chassis into its Tintri product line to start the cost-cutting process of unifying product hardware across its two divisions.
Tintri was acquired by DDN, along with Western Digital’s IntelliFlash and Nexenta’s software-defined storage, in a series of acquisitions in 2018 and 2019. DDN formed an At-Scale division to produce and sell its original DDN array products, and an Enterprise division to sell the Tintri, IntelliFlash and Nexenta products under an Intelligent Infrastructure theme. It has just announced new Tintri T7000 and IntelliFlash H-series arrays.
IDC Research VP Eric Burgener provided a quote for DDN: “Moving to a common hardware platform for both their At-Scale and Enterprise business units leverages economies of scale in engineering, and will offer reliability, manageability and time-to-market advantages with new releases for customers.”
The Tintri VMstore array line has a T1000 all-flash system for remote and branch offices along with an EC6000 enterprise-class line for data centres. It’s heart is a 2 rack unit (RU) chassis containing SAS SSDs.
These two are joined by a new T7000 which uses DDN hardware, with 10 drive bays for NVMe SSDs and 30 per cent faster performance than the EC6000. The drives can be self-encrypting and Tintri offers non-disruptive drive-by-drive expansion. The OS allows FIPS-compliant software encryption with KMIP.
No datasheet has been made available so the speeds and feeds details are not yet known.
Where the Tintri VMstore arrays are targeted at specific virtual server and SQL Server application workloads, the IntelliFlash arrays are general in nature. They offer both all-flash and hybrid flash/disk storage for database, virtualisation and data protection workloads needing both block (FC, iSCSI) and file (NFS, SMb3) data access.
The product range consists of the hybrid T-Series, mixing SSDs and disk drives for fast performance with bulk capacity, the N-Series all-flash NVMe higher performance systems, the HD-Series for all-SAS SSD storage, and the H-Series mixing NVMe SSDS and disk drives for an even higher performance hybrid system than the T-Series.
Tintri has announced new H6100 and H6200 systems and a data sheet says the H6100 has 23 to 92TB raw NVMe SSD capacity and 96 to 1344TB raw disk capacity. The larger H6200 has 46 to 368TB raw NVMe SSD capacity and 720 to 6,480TB raw disk capacity.
An image of the H-Series shows two cabinets and we understand the upper one is the same basic chassis as is used for the T7000, albeit with a different bezel.
DDN says the H-Series autonomously optimises NVMe SD-to-HDD ratios to meet performance and capacity needs. Hybrid modular expansion shelves provide a route to 25PB of effective capacity in 18RU.
Data services include snapshots, cloning, replication, encryption, deduplication, compression, thin provisioning, and backup integration. Concurrent SAN and NAS access is supported as is concurrent NFS and SMB access.
Tintri supplies IntelliFlash analytics and system monitoring capabilities which apply AI, rules engines, predictive decision making, and data-driven workflows to improve overall system health, reliability, and predictability.
H-Series general availability is planned for the fourth 2020 quarter while the T7000 should arrive in the first 2021 quarter.
