Tintri Analytics for IntelliFlash
Cloud-Based Intelligent Analytics
Maximize uptime and efficiency, and simplify administration for IntelliFlash storage systems so you can focus on adding business value.
Storage administration can be manual and time-consuming. As a business owner, you want to focus on high-value projects for your business, but it’s easy to get sidetracked when an unforeseen storage problem strikes. A complex infrastructure with various management tools makes it even harder to address these problems. You ultimately end up spending too much time and money poring over disparate data in an attempt to pinpoint and resolve the issue.
When the solution proves elusive, do you dread contacting customer support and the prospect of spending hours on the phone, sending logs, and answering a list of tedious troubleshooting questions? What if you had an easy-to-use tool that would help you monitor the health, performance, and usage of your storage systems?
What if that tool could predict and alert you of imminent component failures? What if the technical support engineer already had pertinent information about your environment before he or she even answers your call?
This is all possible with Analytics for IntelliFlash.
Analytics for IntelliFlash provides integrated cloud-based intelligent analytics for your IntelliFlash system(s) at no extra charge. You can simplify and transform storage administration by leveraging our AI-driven analytics and easy-to-use cloud portal. It enables you to quickly and easily monitor the health, performance, and usage of all your IntelliFlash systems and is backed by a comprehensive customer support program with a team of storage experts. Analytics for IntelliFlash aggregates the collective user experience from thousands of customer installations worldwide to predict future requirements, provide proactive alerts, and help you detect problems before they develop into component and system failures.
Cloud-Based Intelligent Analytics
Analytics for IntelliFlash collects millions of data points from every IntelliFlash system deployed (where customers have opted to participate) including capacity usage, configurations, and system health and performance. Servers in the cloud process and analyze data to detect issues and identify patterns that can predict trends. Since this is all done in the cloud, there’s no need to install any agents or stand up your own infrastructure.
Globally Monitor All Your Systems
Analytics for IntelliFlash monitors and receives a rich set of telemetry data from thousands of IntelliFlash systems and collects trillions of data points per day to proactively identify issues and provide resolution. Proactively monitor all of your IntelliFlash systems from a single web portal to quickly understand the health, performance and efficiency of your storage environment. Key monitoring parameters include:
- System information (e.g., firmware version, serial numbers)
- System alerts (e.g., warnings, errors, faults)
- Configuration details (e.g., pools, projects, RAID, etc.)
- Performance metrics (e.g., IOPS, latency, cache hit ratios)
- Data reduction rates (e.g., compression and deduplication ratios)
Proactive Alerts
Anticipate and mitigate future problems so you can keep your IntelliFlash systems operating at peak efficiency. With Analytics for IntelliFlash you are able to set up alerts for space usage, thresholds, and improper failover or failback.
Set up the following event-based alerts:
- Capacity alerts based on linear progression analysis of space usage
- Threshold alerts (e.g., media errors, transport errors, SMART stats)
- High Availability alerts (e.g., improper failover/failback)
With proactive alerts, you can accurately predict future requirements and learn about problems before they develop into bottlenecks or failures.
Proactive Support
With access to Tintri’s team of storage experts, you can leverage a combination of knowledge gathered by intelligent analytics and practical expertise from countless customer engagements. Our technical staff can spot problems across your entire IntelliFlash environment, pin-point the affected systems or components, and take immediate measures to quickly resolve the issue. Those measures include notifying customers, reporting faults, opening a support ticket, and/or dispatching replacement parts.
Why Analytics for IntelliFlash?
Analytics for IntelliFlash delivers the deep intelligence, intuitive tools, and world-class support you need to maximize uptime and performance and keep your IntelliFlash systems operating at peak efficiency. Simplify your storage administration workload so you can focus instead on adding value to your business. And remember, Analytics for IntelliFlash is embedded into every IntelliFlash system at no extra charge!
Analytics for IntelliFlash benefits include:
- Lower Operating Expenses: Save time and reduce operating expenses by simplifying storage management.
- Proactively Manage Storage: Anticipate future problems and keep your IntelliFlash systems operating in top condition.
- Maximize Uptime and Performance: Resolve issues before they cause bottlenecks or downtime.
With IntelliFlash, you can transform data into actionable information faster and achieve new levels of efficiency, simplicity, and cost savings.
Key technologies include:
Flexible Architecture
IntelliFlash gives you the flexibility to deploy multiple tiers of persistent storage media within a single storage system: NVMe™ flash, SAS flash, dense flash, and/or hard disk drives. The operating environment intelligently places data on different storage media to deliver optimal performance and capacity.
Metadata Acceleration
IntelliFlash systems automatically separate metadata from data to deliver high performance. The metadata is then organized, aggregated, and placed on high-performance, low-latency persistent storage, accelerating advanced data services such as deduplication, compression, snapshots, clones, and thin provisioning.
Inline Compression and Deduplication
Data is compressed and redundant blocks are removed before they are written to persistent storage. These techniques not only reduce the storage footprint, they also help to free cache space in DRAM and flash for faster reads and writes.
IntelliFlash Data Resiliency
IntelliFlash systems employ multi-parity protection schemes and dynamic stripe widths to eliminate performance overhead and media wear from read- modify-write operations. Supported RAID levels include dual parity RAID, two-way mirroring, and three-way mirroring.
Intelligent Caching
Intelligent caching algorithms place the most frequently accessed application data in DRAM, NVMe or flash. These caching algorithms are optimized for various I/O patterns and seamlessly adapt to differing media latencies across multiple tiers of cache.
Flash Endurance
IntelliFlash features enterprise-class SSDs — offering 10X the endurance of consumer-grade MLC while delivering consistently high performance. IntelliFlash systems further extend the life of SSDs by optimizing I/O for the geometry of flash media. Writes are aligned to sector boundaries and native page sizes to avoid I/O fragmentation and unnecessary media writes. Data is intelligently relocated to ensure uniform wear leveling.Thin Provisioning
Increase your storage utilization rates by not over-allocating capacity while provisioning. Thin provisioning automatically allocates physical storage as data is being written. Any space that’s been allocated but hasn’t been consumed remains available for other applications.
Unified Storage
IntelliFlash natively supports both block (SAN) and file (NAS) protocols, enabling you to run applications and manage files on a single system. Supported protocols include iSCSI, Fibre Channel, NFS, and SMB 3.0.
Point-in-Time Snapshots and Replication
Take an instantaneous snapshot of your data for backups. Snapshots are VM-aware and application consistent. They are space-efficient and incur no performance overhead. You can replicate for DR and restore data instantaneously from the local or remote system.
No-Impact Read/Write Clones
Accelerate the development, test, and QA timeframes of missioncritical applications by creating multiple read/write clones without incurring a performance hit. As with snapshots, clones are spaceefficient, consuming storage only for changed blocks.
Data Integrity
To protect against silent data corruption, IntelliFlash systems perform a checksum process to match data blocks as reads and writes occur, and automatically fix corrupt blocks. They also store the checksum and data in separate nodes of the block tree for further protection.
Non-Disruptive Operations
All IntelliFlash hardware components, including SSDs and HDDs, can be replaced online with zero downtime. Software upgrades can also be performed while maintaining system uptime and data access.
No Single Point of Failure
All media (SSDs and HDDs) in IntelliFlash systems are dual-ported and accessible through a pair of highly available, redundant controllers. The controllers are configured in an active/active manner and can be used simultaneously for data access.
Analytics for IntelliFlash
IntelliFlash systems include integrated cloud-based intelligent analytics, enabling you to quickly and easily monitor the health, performance, and usage of all your IntelliFlash systems. Predict future requirements and detect problems before they develop into component and system failures. By maximizing system uptime and efficiency while simplifying storage administration, you can focus instead on adding value to your business.
Encryption
Security features include 256-bit AES encryption for data at rest. IntelliFlash also delivers inline encryption of data on SSDs and HDDs with unnoticeable impact on performance. Key management for encryption is performed natively in the system without requiring any user intervention.
Application-Aware Provisioning
Automatically tune volumes for specific applications at the click of a button. Select a use case — such as database, server virtualization, and virtual desktop infrastructure — to instantly optimize the volume’s configuration (block size, compression and deduplication settings, etc.)
VMware® Integration
IntelliFlash systems take advantage of VAAI to minimize I/O on the storage network and hypervisor host. The IntelliFlash Operating Environment also includes a vCenter plug-in, enabling you to provision datastores, manage snapshots and restores, and monitor I/O status, space usage, and latency from within vCenter.
Microsoft® Integration
IntelliFlash systems integrate with a broad set of Microsoft technologies, including CSV for failover, clustering for Hyper-V; VSS for application-consistent snapshots and clones; and SMB 3.0 protocol.
Citrix® Ready
IntelliFlash systems have been tested and verified as part of the Citrix Ready® VDI Capacity Program Verified for Citrix XenDesktop®. This enables you to leverage best practices and ensure optimal performance and capacity for your VDI.
Validated Oracle® Designs
IntelliFlash systems have been tested and certified with Oracle VM and validated with Oracle Linux® with UEK in single instance and Oracle RAC deployments.
IntelliFlash™ Operating Environment
Modern Data Centers need to maximize the value of their storage investment by putting their data to work. The IntelliFlash Operating Environment (OE) is built to do just that – easy, efficient, and intelligent infrastructure enabling businesses to achieve:
INTELLIGENCE that automates storage media and maximizes the uptime and efficiency of all your IntelliFlash storage systems with intelligent analytics,
PERFORMANCE that delivers fast storage performance, across all workloads and capacity achieving higher efficiencies at low costs, and
AGILITY that enables developers and data scientists to innovate faster and seamlessly across private and public cloud infrastructures.
Whether you’re looking to accelerate databases, virtualized servers and desktops, or the foundation of a flash multi-cloud environment, the IntelliFlash OE can enable you to turbo-charge your business success through a simple, intelligent infrastructure. Experience different!
Flash Optimized Unified Storage
The IntelliFlash OE provides all the storage services – block, file or virtual machine to consolidate all applications, such as highperformance databases, critical business applications, fast-edge analytics, large-scale virtualized servers, databases, and web-scale applications. IntelliFlash OE delivers enterprise-class data services for all workloads, increasing productivity with real-time data reduction, proven 99.999% availability, non-disruptive upgrades, built-in data protection, multi-media flash management, and intelligent analytics.
The IntelliFlash OE is flash-optimized and seamlessly integrates multiple classes of storage media to deliver optimal performance (high performance at low latency) and the best economics for a wide range of enterprise applications.
With the IntelliFlash OE you’ll experience a unified storage platform with a choice of media including NVMe™ flash, performance flash, dense flash, hard disk drives, or a mixture thereof. You can select the amount of flash to align with the performance and economics needs of your business applications.
Intelligent Metadata Acceleration
The IntelliFlash metadata aggregation and placement technology is a patented, core innovation and the key to delivering advanced data services at the I/O speed and scale flash offers. IntelliFlash OE automatically separates metadata from application data and then organizes, aggregates, and places metadata on low-latency performance layer accelerating data services such as deduplication, compression, snapshots, clones, and thin provisioning.
Figure- IntelliFlash metadata acceleration and caching architecture
Intelligent Media Optimization
IntelliFlash Media Optimization provides the foundation for intelligently and reliably storing data on different types of storage media and optimizing media use within the system. IntelliFlash OE is optimized for the underlying geometry of the medium (NVMe flash, performance flash, dense flash, or hard disk) to ensure long life even under high I/O workloads. Data writes are aligned to sector boundaries for disks and to the native page sizes of flash to avoid fragmented I/O and eliminate unnecessary writes.
Intelligent Data Services
IntelliFlash intelligent data services enable continuous data availability, data protection, and data recovery features reducing the effective cost of owning and operating storage.
Agile Storage System for Hybrid Cloud Environments
All media in IntelliFlash systems are dual ported and accessible through a pair of highly available, redundant controllers. The controllers are configured as active/active and can be used simultaneously for data access. In the event of a controller failure, IntelliFlash OE seamlessly and non-disruptively fails over I/O from one controller to the other. Regardless of the protocol, IntelliFlash OE enables redundant media fabrics by aggregating I/O ports within and across the two controllers, for high data availability.
The IntelliFlash OE natively supports block and file access. Supported block protocols include iSCSI and Fibre Channel; file protocols include NFS and SMB 3.0. All protocols can be used simultaneously over a variety of storage ports.
Figure- IntelliFlash concurrent multi-protocol access
IntelliFlash storage systems deliver incredibly high performance while maximizing efficiency not only for IT, but for your business, by keeping your storage costs in check and making your data come alive.
IntelliFlash™ Storage Systems
The Tintri IntelliFlash intelligent infrastructure is a fourth-generation storage solution that delivers an exceptional user experience through automation, analytic insights, and a variety of time-saving management features to drive your most valuable workloads in today’s data centers
With our comprehensive portfolio of all-flash and hybrid storage systems running a common operating environment, you can transform data into actionable information faster and achieve new levels of efficiency, simplicity, and cost savings.
Mix and Match Media in One Storage System
Whether you need the exceptional performance of NMVe-flash, the sustained performance of SAS-flash or a balance of performance and high capacity afforded by a hybrid system, IntelliFlash intelligent infrastructure cost-effectively satisfies any or all these requirements.
Regardless of which series and model you choose, all IntelliFlash systems share the same operating environment, feature set, and management experience.
IntelliFlash Operating Environment
All IntelliFlash systems run the same IntelliFlash Operating Environment (OE). This fast, flexible OE leverages different grades of storage media — NVMe-flash, SAS-flash, dense-flash, hard disk drives (HDDs) — in a single storage platform.
The IntelliFlash OE understands the inherent characteristics of disparate storage media and intelligently manages data placement to deliver optimal performance at low latency with the best possible economics. It also includes advanced data services, multiprotocol support, flexible management, and intelligent analytics, enabling you to maximize uptime, consolidate workloads, and simplify storage administration.
Analytics for IntelliFlash
Maximize uptime and efficiency, and simplify administration for IntelliFlash storage systems so you can focus on adding business value.
Analytics for IntelliFlash, a no-cost integrated feature of the IntelliFlash OE, enables you to quickly and easily monitor the health, performance, and usage of all your IntelliFlash systems. Powered by cloud-based intelligent analytics and backed by a team of storage experts, you can predict future requirements and detect problems before they develop into component and system failures.
Figure- IntelliFlash intelligent infrastructure supports multiple media types
Figure- IntelliFlash full-featured simplicity
Documentation:
Download the Tintri Analytics for IntelliFlash Tech Brief (PDF).
Download the Tintri IntelliFlash Operating Environment Tech Brief (PDF).
Download the Tintri IntelliFlash Storage Systems Tech Brief (PDF).