For cloud service providers (CSPs), storage can make or break their business. Storage must be reliable, scalable and high performing in order to power their cloud infrastructures. Plus, CSPs must offer services that help them stand out in a crowded marketplace.

It’s about being able to service customers quickly, provide a consistent user experience, give customers exactly what they pay for and provide analysis and insight into customers’ performance to better serve them, said Chuck Dubuque, senior director of product and solution marketing at Tintri.

To help CSPs provide those things, Tintri has created the Tintri Cloud Service Provider Solution. By leveraging Tintri’s portfolio of flash-based VM-aware storage (VAS) systems and value-added software, Tintri Cloud Service Provider Solution allows CSPs to deliver differentiated services such as:

• Multiple tiers of storage performance on the same array defined by VM-level quality of service (QoS) policies;
• End-to-end infrastructure visibility at the VM level to allow granular chargeback for storage resources and actionable troubleshooting capabilities;
• Real-time and predictive analytics for capacity planning and upselling.

With those features, CSPs can quickly “give customers exactly what they’re paying for—no more and no less—which provides consistent predictable experience for the customer, which is very important,” Dubuque said.

Being able to analyze a customer’s performance to troubleshoot problems, provide insight and suggest alternatives is a key differentiator, he added.

“CSPs can see where their problems are, make the customer happy by fixing a configured virtual machine or maybe replace a switch that’s acting up in their network—all invisible to the customer,” Dubuque said.

With the Tintri Cloud Service Provider solution, which is targeted at midsize providers, users also have access to Tintri VMstore storage, which has features to make cloud storage more efficient, including:

• High VM density with high-capacity utilization, operational efficiencies and zero over-provisioning;
• Storage for multi-tenant virtualized environments, which allows greater margins, lower total cost of ownership and per-VM isolation to eliminate noisy neighbors;
• Automated scaling; and
• Integration with multiple concurrent hypervisors, including VMware Inc.’s vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer and OpenStack.

In addition, providers have access to Tintri’s portfolio of VAS systems and software, including Tintri VMstore flash storage systems and Tintri Global Center, which manages and provides actionable real-time VM-level analytics for more than 100,000 virtual machines across all supported hypervisors.

Tintri customers Cirrity and Clouditalia said Tintri’s solutions allow them to better address costs and performance.

“Tintri outperforms the alternatives at a significantly lower cost per VM,” said Dan Timko, president and CTO at Cirrity in a news release. “Our costs are much better aligned to our actual consumption of storage. We can deploy new capacity into production in less time than our previous traditional storage.”

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