One of the big things going on in the storage industry right now is the noise being caused by flash storage. Seems like almost overnight companies have popped up and they are putting flash storage almost everywhere. You've got hybrid storage options with flash and spinning disk, all flash storage arrays, host based flash solutions, and probably lots of other types I don't even know about yet. Earlier this week Cisco made some noise when they announced they would be acquiring flash storage provider Whiptail, a company I had never even heard of until I read the press release. This sparked some interesting debate amongst the tech crowd on twitter and various blogs I check out about how this acquisition may fit into Cisco's overall strategy and I suppose that remains to be seen.
So anyway the point is that flash is a pretty big deal right now and it's clear that there are many storage options for the enterprise popping up that are taking heavy advantage of it. Some of these storage options are also moving away from the traditional SAN model and going toward a more purpose built approach or targeting a certain business function. As I run a very heavily virtualized environment with very few traditional physical systems still in operation, I was attracted to Tintri early on in my research and wanted to learn more about them which I had the opportunity to do at this past VMworld. My team did some investigation and talked with some folks out in the industry and decided that it would be worth taking a look at Tintri and earlier this week our VMstore T540 arrived.
Unboxing
The first thing that you'll find when you receive a Tintri appliance is that they do a nice job of packing it up quite well.
Ok so that's not too terribly exciting. Once we got this thing out of the box we saw that the appliance itself is a solid 3U chassis and is very much assembled by our fine friends over at Supermicro, which I have since learned is used by many storage vendors for their offerings as well. I believe I had heard that this was the case at some point but I didn't quite remember until I got it out of the box and noticed the branding on top of the chassis. (Sorry some of these pictures are a little blurry - I'm new at this mess!)
The Innards!
Being engineers naturally the first thing that we did was pop off the top cover and see what's going on inside.
I'm no expert when it comes to case design but it certainly looks like they built this to where people won't screw around with the magic smoke inside these things and I can't say I blame them for that one. It certainly looks well organized inside and they've done a good job to keep you away from the important stuff. We weren't interested in messing with any of the components inside anyway - just checking things out. You'll quickly see on the inside that the Supermicro branding jumps out at you again.
The Bytes
So the T540 system is a 16 drive system with 8 each of solid state and spinning drives. It looks like the HDDs are 3 TB drives from HGST which is a Hitachi company that was purchased by Western Digital (had to look that mess up) and then the SSDs are from Intel. They've rigged up the SSDs into a standard HDD size drive carrier so I wasn't able to see a ton of information about the SSDs themselves without removing the drive and we weren't quite interested in doing all that.
Racking/Cabling
The rails included with the Tintri are fairly easy to get installed which was nice to see. So many times have I purchased various systems and been sent an awful rack mount kit that just makes me want to cry. With the Tintri there's a section of the rail that you have to remove and attach to the system itself and rather than using screws there are some notches on the chassis that the rail slides under and that holds it in place. You may have to use a hammer or whatever you've got laying around to get it in there nice and snug but it goes on without too much trouble. The rails themselves snap into your rack much like the Rapid Rails that I have with my Dell PowerEdge servers. Once you get all of that in place you just line it up and slide the rail sections on the chassis into the catch on the rails on the rack and then tighten it down.
Another nice touch was outside of the standard power cable that you get with most devices (NEMA 5-15 to C13) they also included some adapters to go from the 5-15 connection into a C14 connection which I see commonly used inside datacenters. It didn't help me in my situation (I need C13 to NEMA 6-15P for my PDUs and I keep plenty of extras on hand) but I'm guessing that the guys at Tintri have been in that situation before when you buy a new device and it doesn't come with the right power cables for your datacenter. Thank you for at least giving us some options!
The T540 is a dual controller unit in Active/Standby mode. Each controller has four network connections - two 1 gigabit connections for management traffic and two 10 gigabit connections for data traffic. There's also a slot for another optional NIC that you can add and dedicate to replication traffic but our system did not have that. To have the minimal configuration and still maintain redundancy you'll need four network connections - a 1 GB and a 10 GB connection to each controller. I decided to go ahead and go all out and cable up all 8 connections for a little extra comfort. Naturally I cabled up each controller to two different switches so I would have protection against cable failure and switch failure. There's also two redundant power supplies along with a connection for a KVM dongle so you can access the local console to do the initial config. If you connect up everything it'll look a little something like this:
The story so far..
I haven't had a chance to do much with the system yet but the racking and cabling was fairly painless. In the next few days I'll have an opportunity to start playing with this thing and I'm very interested to see what kind of performance I can get out of it. I hope to share more info as I move through getting this thing up and running and get some VMs running on this guy. Stay tuned!
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