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Tintri gazes hungrily at Japan after nailing Fujitsu OEM deal

Chance to ‘significantly expand our presence’ say array bods

Hybrid array startup Tintri has bagged Fujitsu as its doorway into the Japanese market.

Fujitsu has its in-house ETERNUS DX arrays, classic dual-controller gear, and 50PB scale-out array for big data.

The Japanese company has announced its ETERNUS TR line, with TR820, 850 and 880 models aimed at the VDI market. They feature compression, a hybrid flash-plus-disk design, and support for up to 3,500 virtual machines.

DX arrays are disk-based, with hybrid flash/disk options, and an all-flash version, the DX200 S3 with a pre-configured version called the DX200F.

Interestingly, these three TR systems are only available in Japan. Fujitsu announced its TR products there last August, saying it was “designed especially for use in large-scale virtualisation environments", and "developed by US-based Tintri, Inc".

The TR820, 850 and 880 are OEM or distributed versions of Tintri’s VMstore T820, T850 and T880.

Fujitsu is OEM’ing the Tintri products because it wanted to "accelerate its virtualisation business". There was no mention in the Fujitsu news of Tintri’s VM-aware and VM-focussed system software features; missing a trick there, we think.

Ken Klein, Tintri’s chairman and CEO had a friendly quote in the Fujitsu announcement, saying the deal with Fujitsu "represents a powerful opportunity for Tintri to significantly expand our presence ... The OEM distribution agreement will benefit millions of customers in search of storage solutions that will enable them to provide services instead of managing storage infrastructure".

Tintri Japan sells the VMstore T800 product line and is participating in ETERNUS TR Seminars with Fujitsu.

What does this say about the DX products in the VDI and general virtualised server market? Clearly Fujitsu Japan thinks the TR series trumps the DX line for feeding data to virtualised servers.

DX array customers and prospects elsewhere in the world, with virtualised server hosts in mind, might start thinking the same thing.

If the TR line is successful in Japan then we might expect it to be rolled out elsewhere in the world – if DX/TR positioning can be devised and if any issues with Tintri’s existing channel partners can be worked out.

Another thought; this is the first time a mainstream disk array provider has struck a deal with one of the three leading next-generation hybrid array firms, namely Nimble Storage, Tegile and Tintri. Will more such deals now come into existence? ®

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