Tintri Operating System gets an upgrade with expanded orchestration and automation capabilities

Tintri claims "Amazon-like agility and scale" for Tintri OS after integrating VMware vRealize Orchestrator plug-in

Cloud infrastructure company Tintri has released the latest version of its Tintri Operating System, which includes expanded orchestration via a VMware vRealize Orchestrator plug-in, and improved automation capabilities.

The aim, claims the company, is to simplify the deployment and management of enterprise-scale clouds for both organisations - for private cloud deployments - and for service providers.

"Only Tintri makes it possible for an organisation to easily deploy and then tear down thousands of virtual machines in minutes, and for a cloud service provider to guarantee performance to their customers by isolating individual virtual machines and setting per-virtual machine quality-of-service," said Tintri CEO Ken Klein.

The company claims that the latest release encompasses, in addition to improved orchestration and automation, better container support, public cloud integration, predictive analytics and even a chatbot interface so that basic queries can be handled with simple, plain language requests.

The key upgrade is the integration of the vRealize Orchestrator Plugin, though, which is intended to expand the level of automation Tintri OS offers. Specifically, Tintri claims, the plug-in is intended to automate storage operations, including snapshot, clone, replicate and copy data management at the virtual machine-level.

The belief is that storage will continue to become a highly commoditised offering - whether ‘as-a-service' or in-house hardware - and that a key differentiator for a company like Tintri will be smooth integration with in-house and cloud apps via APIs at the virtual machine level.

Tintri's users can integrate vRealize into VMware management and automation systems, such as vRealize Automation and vCloud Director. The plug-in will also expose Tintri operations to higher-level management and orchestration platforms.

"VMware vRealize Orchestrator facilitates the automation of complex IT tasks. With its vRealize Orchestrator plug-in, Tintri further extends its integration with multiple areas of the VMware portfolio," said Rob Smoot, vice president of product marketing, Cloud Management Business Unit, at VMware.

In addition, Tintri claims that Tintri OS will also introduce support for containers via vSphere Integrated Containers, which will enable VMware users to utilise containers without re-architecting their entire infrastructure, gaining the benefits of container-level quality-of-service and real-time and predictive analytics.

The company also plans to support containers with Docker Volumes via a Flocker plug-in supported by container software company ClusterHQ. The Flocker plug-in will also enable Tintri OS to plug into container orchestration platforms, including Kubernetes, Apache Mesos and Docker Swarm.

Tintri Analytics, meanwhile, will provide cloud-based predictive analytics powered by Amazon's Elasticsearch. It will enable users to be able to run sub-second queries involving data points from the 160,000 virtual machines supported under Tintri, with an upcoming release enabling users to forecast resources requirements for their environments.

Finally, the public-cloud integration features will enable Tintri OS users to extend their existing on-premise private cloud deployments into Amazon or other public clouds.

Tintri S3 Connector will natively protect Tintri snapshots to cloud object storage, such as Amazon S3, and on-premises object storage, such as IBM Cloud Object Storage. It can offer secure data-at-rest and data-in-flight encryption for backup data, the company claims.