Disclaimer: I was offered a pizza to write this post.  I haven’t taken up the offer yet, but I will be.

I had the opportunity to test drive Tintri’s “Lightning Lab” about six months ago and the nice folks at Tintri thought I might like to post about my experiences. They’ve offered me a pizza for my troubles which, coincidentally, ties in nicely with their current promotion “The Tintri Pizza Challenge“. If you’re in the US or Canada it’s worth checking it out.

In any case, the Lightning Lab is Tintri’s internet accessible lab that showcases a number of its arrays and provides you with an opportunity to take their gear for a spin. From a hardware perspective it’s pretty well provisioned, with T5060, T880, T620 & T540 arrays, along with a Dell R720 host with 128GB of RAM and 2 Dell R610 servers with 48GB of RAM. From a software perspective, the version of the lab I used had VMware vSphere 5.5U2b installed, but I believe this has been since updated. There’s also a functional version of Tintri Global Center, and both the Web Client Plug-in and the vROps plugin configured. Networking wise, management runs overs a 1GbE Dell switch, with Data travelling via a 10GbE Arista switch.

Global Center has a pretty neat login screen. Like all good admins, I use many dots in my password too.

There’s a bunch of stuff I could show from the interface, but one of my favourite bits is the ability to see an aggregated view of your deployed VMstores.

The interface is simple to operate and painfully colourful too. It’s also simple to navigate and makes it really easy to get a quick view of what’s going on in your environment without having to do a lot of digging.

 

Conclusion

There’s a lot more I could write about Tintri. If you’re aligned with their use case (NFS-only), they have a compelling offering that’s worth checking out. The Lightning Lab is an excellent tool to take their platform for a spin and gain a good understanding of just what you can do with the VMstore and Global Center. I think these kind of offerings are great, and not just because there’s pizza involved. If more storage vendors read this and think that they should be doing something like this, then that’s a great thing. I’ve barely scratched the surface, so you should head over to Andrea Mauro’s blog and check out his thorough write-up of his Lightning Lab experience.