Against the backdrop of all-flash array vendor Pure Storage Inc. reporting a 167 percent revenue increase in its third quarter earnings call, Tintri Inc. is making a move to seize some of that growth with the introduction of a new low-end entry into the fray that targets budget-minded buyers. The T5040 is the third addition to the T5000 series that the company debuted four months ago to complement its flagship hybrid systems.

The T800 uses a combination of solid-state memory and traditional disk powered by homegrown management software that has earned Tintri second place on Gartner Inc.’s most storage array ranking for virtualization use cases. The T5000 lineup is geared toward more demanding workloads like databases with steep speed requirements that can justify the premium of using flash as the primary storage medium, a category that today’s launch will put the company in a considerably better position to address.

The T5040 packs 5.76 terabytes of solid-state memory into a 2U chassis, which is enough to store up to 18 terabytes of data with compression, or approximately 1,500 virtual machines worth. A 40U cabinet sporting an array in every slot can is thus able to support as much as 1.48 petabytes of files with 4 million input/output operations per second, according to Tintri. Each box comes with a a pair of 1GbE links that can be optionally upgraded to 10GbE for bandwidth-intensive environments.

The T5040 is rolling out in conjunction with a new iteration of Tintri’s management software that introduces improved hypervisor integration, its main differentiator over rivaling providers like Pure Storage. The main highlight is the addition of support for Citrix XenSever, which joins better-known alternatives such as VMware vSphere and Microsoft Corp.’s Hyper-V on the list of virtualization options available to customers.

Photo via Tintri