VMblog: Can you give VMblog readers a quick overview of your company?
Phil Trickovic: Tintri's mission is simplicity. Tintri has fundamentally changed the way enterprises plan, deploy and manage virtualized workloads. Tintri's purpose-built technologies are architected for enhancement of modern data delivery processes. Tintri removes the common tasks associated with legacy deployment processes and complex legacy architectures. Our workload aware platform delivers intelligent, autonomous, highly scalable, guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS), and accelerated development cycles. Thousands of customers have saved countless administrative hours using Tintri's innovative technologies. You can explore the Tintri portfolio of solutions at https://www.tintri.com.
VMblog: Your company is sponsoring this year's VMware Explore event. Can you talk about what that sponsorship looks like?
Trickovic: Tintri is a silver sponsor for VMware Explore and also has an ad hoc meeting room for private briefings.
VMblog: VMware has decided to change the name of the event this year from VMworld to VMware Explore. With VMworld being such a part of the history, do you have any thoughts on the name change?
Trickovic: We recognize that VMware thrives on reinvention and is focused on customer innovation. The VMworld name has an established rapport in the industry, but the new name brings a fresh new perspective on solving problems faced in multi-workload, multi-cloud, and multi-workspace IT environments. This aligns with Tintri's innovation mission. Our mutual interest is to continue to innovate and provide high performance, easy to implement and use, purpose-built solutions for the enterprise.
VMblog: What are your thoughts and expectations with the event being in person again instead of just a digital / online event? Are attendees ready for this? Do you anticipate the crowd size of VMworld pre-pandemic?
Brock Mowry: We are really excited to see all the people that have been faithful Tintri VMstore users over the years and even more excited to see all the new faces in the business. With the return to in-person events, we look forward to connecting with current as well as new VMware users that may have not seen VMstore and what it can do for their organizations. VMstore can sometimes be perceived as a "too good to be true" technology until it is seen in person. VMware Explore, and the former VMworld, has always been a great way to expose cutting-edge technology directly to the attendees. And, it allows an interaction that fosters deeper understanding of the impact the products and features can have on operations.
VMblog: How can attendees of the event find you? What do you have planned at your booth this year? What type of things will attendees be able to do at your booth?
Mowry: Attendees can find Tintri on The Expo floor at booth #1604. We'll be hosting live versions of our epic Geek Out! technology sessions over the four days of the event. Attendees can learn more about Tintri's purpose-built solutions for virtualized workloads - and, they have a chance to win some fun prizes as well. Demos will also showcase hybrid cloud management, full data mobility with the cloud, ransomware protection, and AI and predictive analytics.
VMblog: Do you have any speaking sessions during the event? If so, can you give us the details?
Mowry: I, along with Steve Phillips, Principal Systems Engineer, will be hosting an expo theater session titled "Tintri VMstore Knows Your Workloads Inside & Out and Never Asks for a Raise" on Tuesday, Aug. 30 at 4-4:30 p.m. PDT.
Featured in the same format as our live Geek Out! technology demo sessions, the session will showcase Tintri VMstore features that reduce business tasks at hand and improve life (just like your best employees). The 30-minute session, we will demonstrate leveraging Tintri VMstore's deep understanding of workloads to ensure the best performance of your infrastructure, eliminating time wasted troubleshooting complex situations that lead to both application and business latency. We will also introduce the next evolution of Tintri VMstore. Come curious, ready to laugh, learn, and Geek Out!
VMblog: What are you personally most interested in seeing or learning at VMware Explore?
Mowry: What's coming with VMware as a company! VMware events have always been the place where new features and initiatives have been announced. With technology and business always in a state of change, it's exciting to hear about all the upcoming developments with the VMware platform and the business that makes it all happen.
VMblog: Can you give us the high-level rundown of your company's technology offerings? What kind of message will an attendee hear from you this year?
Mowry: 2022 marks Tintri's 10th anniversary of delivering purpose-built solutions that store and manage virtual machines in enterprise data centers. Tintri will be making some additional product and feature announcements at VMware Explore. We are very excited to share some of our new and expanded abilities that will enhance the end users' experience and enable them to design, deploy and support their VMware environments in ways that were not possible till today.
VMblog: Talking about your product solutions, can you give readers a few examples of how your offerings are unique? What are your differentiators? What sets you apart from the competition?
Trickovic: I‘ve been with Tintri for eight years now, and I believe it offers one of the most under realized technologies on the market currently. Within that comes the ‘user data based' QoS. Why? Within our main enterprise segment, 60% of the Fortune 1000, we find thousands to tens of thousands of VMs under management. These deployments have become quite labor and equipment intensive. Tintri's intelligence (QoS), which over time, adjusts resources available to ‘X' workload. Based on policy, Tintri automatically adjusts resources available. This is done in real time without impact to the workload. Performance tuning tasks are virtually eliminated.
This intelligence expands into troubleshooting and planning. Tintri delivers the most robust and thorough I/O stack analytics in real time. This allows us to pinpoint issues with the network, compute, storage, and all points in between. Often, we identify issues long before they are impactful. This capability becomes even more critical as we expand into hybrid cloud, edge, and remote device type deployments. Data recency and locality is a quietly growing trend. The size of data sets is growing by the second. The speed of light is not adjusting any time soon. Our built-in intelligence and modeling capabilities allow our customers to gather, analyze and execute based on their own data usage patterns. Build your platforms on your actual usage patterns, not what we or any other vendor says you should be doing.
So, one of the most incredible things to me about Tintri is that we are able to eliminate those problems. With our AI engine and workload awareness, which we have built into our solutions, those tasks and issues are eliminated.
One product we provide is VMstore, a powerful, flexible, and simple solution. It is the world's most intelligent storage management system, featuring AI-driven autonomous operations, app-level visibility and real-time and predictive analytics for hands-off operations for nearly all administrative tasks - reducing administrative overhead by as much as 95%. The next-generation V7000 is the first NVMe-based VMstore platform, leveraging DDN's award-winning NVMe technology and providing 30% faster performance than previous generation VMstore systems. VMstore T7000 customers benefit from using the same storage hardware controller as DDN at-scale solutions, deployed in the most demanding AI, analytics, deep learning, and high IOPS workloads on the planet.
Another solution is Tintri Analytics, a cloud-based SaaS offering that provides the predictive intelligence to inform and automate important workload decisions and to model future application requirements for capacity and performance based on the actual usage patterns of existing applications.
Tintri Analytics is designed from the ground up to support resource planning and leverages over three years of real-time VM- and container-level data, including historical and current performance and resource usage statistics on every application in a VMstore environment.
What sets Tintri Analytics apart from other analytics tools is that it has visibility at the object VM level, distinguishing it from the others; it detects the signature of a ransomware event at the VM or application level; it can be used to restore to just the VMs involved in the attack to a point in time prior to the appearance of the malware; it creates scenarios where workloads or VMstore systems are added or deleted; and it enhances the language and provides metadata trends by managed object (VMware VMs).
VMblog: What specifically does your company offer a VMware shop or a VMware implementation? What problems do you solve for them?
Trickovic: Around 2003, when VMware came into market, the big storage block providers were already in place. Management of these storage platforms have become complex over the past 20 years. So, Tintri developed a methodology and a backend storage technology to offer VMware users a greatly simplified solution.
Tintri VMstore provides simple integration, visibility, analytics, and data protection at the managed object level. This eliminates manually managing storage constructs such as LUNs or volumes and enables VMstore to leverage machine learning and ensure the service needs of each individual workload.
We offer QoS. We're the only one who provides automated QoS, which is based on statistics and data metrics that we gather from within the end-user's environment - not what we think or what somebody else thinks it should be. We actually gather the statistics and over time, we readjust resources to properly serve those VMs.
VMblog: How does your company work with VMware? Where do you fit within the VMware ecosystem?
Trickovic: In 2008, Tintri was architected primarily for VMware by our founders, who came from VMware. So, we've had a very tight relationship with VMware from day one. We partner closely doing lots training and integration work with APIs, sharing methodologies and doing joint walkthrough support agreements for our employees. Tintri continues to innovate, constantly enhancing, updating and advancing capabilities for its customers working in VMware environments.
VMblog: VMworld has typically been a launching platform for new products. At VMware Explore, will your company be announcing anything new? If so, can you give us a sneak peek?
Trickovic: We do have some exciting news that we'll be announcing on Monday, Aug. 29 at VMware Explore - the next evolution of Tintri VMstore, as we break out of the datacenter racks and move to the cloud. This includes bringing the tried-and-true VMstore intelligence, data services and ease of use to the world of Kubernetes, both on-prem and in the cloud.
VMblog: VMware will be covering big topics in their keynote, but what big changes or trends do you see taking shape in the industry for 2022 and heading into 2023?
Trickovic: There are three areas that we're really focused on that we believe are of interest to VMware as well. One is developing microservices and application delivery. Second is still emerging, but we see coming down the pipeline in the next few months. There will be real changes in the way applications are deployed and how resources are used due to the conjunction with VMware, Tintri and our upcoming release. Third is how customers will be able to get down - and it's almost a full circle of what happened years ago - to the mixed type billing or fungible services. Not just fungible hardware, but where it needs to be run. Data locality, mobility and the cost take out within - those are the main areas that we see coming in the next 18-24 months, which we're also seeing a much broader adoption across the market.
VMblog: Are you giving away any prizes at your booth or participating in any prize giveaways?
Trickovic: As mentioned, we'll be hosting live versions of our epic Geek Out! technology sessions over the four days of the event. Attendees can learn more about Tintri's purpose-built solutions for virtualized workloads - and, they have a chance to win a Tintri branded Nintendo Switch by attending these demo sessions.
VMblog: Is your company sponsoring any type of party or get together during the event?
Trickovic: Come by booth #1604 to hear more about the event we have planned for Tuesday, Aug. 30 after the Hall Crawl, and register to join us for a sure to be memorable time.
