Published in News

EMC loses to Tintri hybrid flash

by on25 June 2015


Cheaper and faster 

Social housing provider Housing & Care 21 has dumped EMC and swapped to Tintri hybrid flash storage arrays.

According to Computer Weekly the tech swap  To replacing its existing SANs was less than it would have cost to extend maintenance for another three years with EMC.

Housing & Care 21 manages 19,000 homes in 530 locations. It has more than 1,000 users running apps delivered by VMware (250 virtual machines on 25 physical servers) and Citrix XenDesktop, with a main datacentre at Luton and secondary site in Birmingham.

The outfit was all set to renew maintenance agreements for three years on its two EMC SANs but had a falling out with EMC's sales department. The housing provider needed to sign an agreement for six years for its budgets but EMC would not go beyond four.

So Housing & Care 21 did some number crunching and worked out that maintenance for three years on the EMCs would have cost £180,000 however it could buy two Tintris and three years' maintenance for £120,000."

Ed Newman who has the unfortunate job title of IS technical services manager at Housing & Care 21 said that EMC arrays were over-specified for what the association needed, and were unreliable.

"They were very big, very expensive SANs essentially just providing LUNs for VMware, especially as we were by then doing things like replication in VMware with Zerto. Also, we had a disk drive fail on average once a month," he said.

The EMC [management software] Unisphere was a byzantine labyrinth with a minotaur of complexity at its centre,
Newman said it is difficult to get your head around how convoluted it is to do simple things.

"In Tintri, if we want to provision a LUN, it takes two minutes. In EMC, you go through several different screens; you present the LUN, mount it, accept it back into EMC and so on."

There have also been improvements in performance at the backend.

On recommendations from its reseller, Housing & Care 21 deployed two Tintri units, one 80TB T880 at its main Luton datacentre and a 50TB T850 at Birmingham.

Tintri marries low-latency flash with bulk capacity on spinning disk, targeting virtual machine environments. To do this it does away with volumes, LUNs and Raid groups, and maps I/O requests directly to the virtual disk.

Tintri's key selling point is that its storage is addressable at the level of the VM, and it does away with the traditional unit of storage provisioning, the LUN.

Last modified on 25 June 2015
Rate this item
(0 votes)

Read more about: