Tintri has added a container storage interface to its VMstore offering, a move that provides customers with management and metrics for Kubernetes and has been years in the making.
Tintri by DDN, a storage and management vendor specializing in virtual machines, is looking beyond VMs to offer native support for Kubernetes with the same level of observability adding to what customers can store on their systems.
The VMstore container storage interface (CSI) driver, due out this year, expands the storage array's features to Kubernetes environments, bringing VMstore's observability, performance and data protection to containers as well as virtual machines.
The new CSI driver is a small addition to VMstore, given its broader support for iSCSI, Windows SQL Server and others, but it reflects what's happening in IT, according to Russ Fellows, an analyst at The Futurum Group.
"Tintri understands the world has moved beyond just VMs -- it's also a Kubernetes world," he said.
VMs, containers side by side
Tintri stands apart from other storage vendors because of its advanced observability and automated workload optimization features, according to Paul Nashawaty, an analyst at TheCube Research. These abilities provide centralized oversight of both containers and VMs.
"This approach provides granular visibility and performance tuning -- a capability not uniformly available across other vendors," Nashawaty said.
Tintri understands the world has moved beyond just VMs -- it's also a Kubernetes world.
Russ FellowsAnalyst, The Futurum Group
Fellows added that VMstore's ease of use and its ability to manage data on a per-file basis, which now includes Kubernetes environments in addition to VMs, can provide a better understanding of performance metrics and capacity for planning and utilization of resources.
"With a lot of storage systems ... it's hard to map a particular Kubernetes application to a specific block range and understand what the performance is," he said.
'Part of my vision'
Tintri, which hasn't released an array since the VMstore T7000 series in 2021, is later than other storage companies to support Kubernetes on its array, although it began supporting containers in its Tintri.io cloud offering before this.
However, container support has been a focus for the company for some time, according to Brock Mowry, CTO at Tintri.
"I came into the company about three years ago, and [adding container support] has been a part of my vision since I came in," Mowry said.
Nashawaty said that although Tintri is a later entry to Kubernetes, the support aligns with the increasing adoption of containers. This might put Tintri behind with enterprises that have already adopted and are already using Kubernetes, but it could have given the vendor more time to polish its offering.
"The delay may reflect Tintri's strategy to refine their Kubernetes-specific offerings better to meet evolving needs, such as observability and optimization," he said.
Adam Armstrong is a TechTarget Editorial news writer covering file and block storage hardware and private clouds. He previously worked at StorageReview.
