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DDN day approaches for Tintri: Storage-flinger finalising rescue buy

Collapsed firm to be reborn as DDN division punting enterprise arrays

In potentially sphincter easing news for Tintri customers facing abandonment after the company's collapse, DDN is finalising its acquisition of the failed business.

The purchase should be completed in the next few days. DDN said it would bring support and product continuity to Tintri’s 1,600-strong customer base, and enlarge DDN’s existing HPC-focused product portfolio and addressable market.

DDN’s Alex Bouzari, co-founder and CEO, popped open the quote can to offer this:

“Our first order of business is to deliver immediate world-class support to the more than one thousand Tintri customers worldwide. Beyond that, we are thrilled to help businesses achieve significant value and transformational simplicity for their server virtualisation, DevOps and VDI needs.”

DDN will honour existing support agreements for Tintri customers and said it is building a support organisation and investing to expand Tintri’s technology roadmap in server virtualisation, NVMe, expanded analytics, databases and other areas.

Tintri will operate as a separate division within DDN and will have its own sales, support and engineering resources. The acquisition price isn’t being revealed.

Tintri_T850_bezel

Tintri T850 array

+Comment

By mid-September DDN will be in the scale-out enterprise SAN array business with all-flash and hybrid flash/disk arrays along with management and analytics software. It will need to add an NVMe-oF capability as soon as possible and adapt the roadmap to react to new flash drive formats, such as rulers, media such as QLC (4bits/cell) 3D NAND, tiering of fast and slow flash, and storage-class memory, meaning 3D XPoint or similar tech.

There is raging competition in this market - including hungry startups Apeiron, E8, Excelero, Kaminario and Pavilion Data Systems and mainstream storage brands from Dell EMC to IBM, HPE and Net App - and broadening NVMe-oF carrier protocols - RoCE, iWARP, Fibre Channel and TCP.

DDN has to pilot its way through these cross-currents to find a market niche or niches in which it can prosper. We would imagine that niche will involve super-fast, high-capacity Tintri arrays integrated with some of DDN’s existing products.

Tintri failed because its sales team couldn't get their act together and cash flow dried up. El Reg's storage desk will be watching progress - or not - with a keen eye. ®

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