70% of customers surveyed optimized time savings with business growth initiatives. The rest focused on personal growth and work-life balance.
Cost and complexity topped the list of challenges Tintri customers were facing before they decided to deploy VMstore. These former users of standard infrastructure noted that such highly specialized and complex legacy systems added significantly to their operating costs. “The legacy systems were very complicated,” noted John Ward, Enterprise IT Architect at the University of California Irvine. “We had to send our admins to the vendor’s training classes to learn how to configure aggregates, volumes, and all of the other components. Essentially, there were far too many knobs to turn and a lot of pitfalls if we did it wrong. As a result, we had to have dedicated specialists for those systems.” Not surprisingly, many customers we interviewed echoed the same sentiment.
Magnus Osterlund, Solution Specialist at Iver AB, described their “Before Tintri” situation: having to turn to his manager for latency information every time he needed it, having to schedule training and education for network admins, and basically dealing with overly complex systems that required too much time, resources, and effort to manage. They went on to test several solutions before deciding that VMstore was the best of the lot.
Why Tintri VMstore?
We turned to customers who, like Osterlund, implemented VMstore four to five years ago. They are in the best position to explain why they believe they made the right choice, and why they will continue to invest in VMstore. “This year, 2019, is the first time ever that we did a support renewal of a storage solution, says Thomas Spindler, Business Development Manager at Iver AB. “That hasn’t happened before. We always replaced storage with new boxes. VMstore performance is still top notch after 4 years, even in the first hybrids we purchased.”
Ward concludes: “Four years after we purchased VMstore systems for our campus infrastructure, other storage vendors still have not caught up to what VMstore systems could do when we first installed them. VMstore is storage for those who have better things to do than manage storage.”
While cost and complexity were mentioned most frequently, other issues that VMstore helped resolve were also brought up in various use cases: moving to a virtualized environment and needing the best storage solution for it, difficulty in management, as well as performance and reliability issues.
Time savings is one consistent benefit resulting from the simplicity that VMstore brings to the IT environment. We surveyed dozens of Tintri customers at last year’s VMworld conference, asking them about their experience. The responses enthusiastically validated the time savings point, and the value it brings to them personally.
Top survey results show that Tintri’s Intelligent Infrastructure gives application owners more time to focus on process improvement and automation:
“We’ve been able to focus a lot more on process improvement, automation, and being able to really even turn some of that control back over to app owners, and be able to focus on how we can do disaster recovery planning and some of the other things that get swept under the rug when you don’t have time to deal with them.”
VMstore enables customers to target projects that increase efficiency and streamline business, instead of spending time managing storage:
“It really shifted our resources from being storage administrators to being application managers and focus on bigger business problems. So, we took that extra time that we would spend administering storage and trying to figure that out, to go out and work with our customers in the agencies. What is the next business problem that we can help you solve? And start to architect early rather than worrying about the problems on the back end trying to solve them through performance and other things. We shifted our focus to be more proactive with our customer base.”
“It allows us to really work on other cool projects, right? It allows us to work on different automations and just play with so much other technology, instead of having one guy babysitting storage all day. Carving out aggregates, moving data across, you know, who wants to do that??”
Based on anecdotal information we received at the conference, time savings also means going from hours or days to minutes, from installation to management. A conservative estimate would be 50% savings, which translates to an average of $58,920 per year per full-time employee.[1]
“It makes a huge difference!” declared a customer from a wireless enterprise. “The fact that I can take a copy of one VM and turn it into a hundred in literally seconds, it takes me longer to IP those VMs than it does to create a hundred of them. It makes VMstore the most powerful tool in my toolbox.”
Other areas where VMstore customers are now spending their time include learning latest trends and technologies instead of day-to-day administration, putting out fires that are not in storage but rather in compute or even in the political arena, and rearchitecting data stores and migrating to the cloud, to name a few.
Keith Coker, CEO of Green Cloud Technologies, sums it up best: “As always, if we have more money to invest in growing the business, we put it right back in growing the business through recruitment, sales, promotions out to our partners that ultimately ends up, you know, growing the top line of the business.”
It doesn’t get better than hearing it directly from our customers: Tintri continues to save thousands of organizations millions of hours of management. To learn more, visit .devtintrinew.wpengine.com.
1. Based on mean salaries posted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for Computer Hardware Engineers.
