Five months after launching its partner program, Tintri reports that it has witnessed its revenue increase by 400 percent in the Q4. The company says that 150 new enterprises signed up in the past three months, and that its hardware now powers 30,000 virtual machines worldwide.

Tintri makes ‘VM-aware’ appliances, storage arrays specifically designed to power large-scale virtualized environments.  The company’s NFS implementation ranked as the best for application-based VMware storage in a recent Wikibon study that polled IT professionals and compared the capabilities of 14 different arrays, primarily from leading vendors.

“2012 saw an inflection point in the evolution towards a software-defined data center,” said Kieran Harty, CEO and co-founder of Tintri. “Much like the drive for server consolidation a decade ago sparked the virtualization revolution, enterprise customers are trying to manage an explosion in storage requirements frequently driven by the unique demands of virtualization initiatives. Customers are looking for help at a time of shrinking capital budgets while legacy vendors push expensive solutions that were not designed for today’s virtual environments.”

Tintri says that 58 percent of its customers virtualized at least 75 percent of their infrastructure, and that the key “technical hurdles” in storage are all virtualization related. The top three challenges that clients listed include performance isolation for VMs, VM-level storage performance visibility and VMware API integration in that order.

Virtualization is but one of the trends that can be credited with Tintri’s explosive growth last quarter. Companies are virtualizing their infrastructure because they have more end-points and data to manage, and Tintri is far from being the only vendor that is benefiting from this trend.  All-flash storage systems maker Nimbus claims that sales have quadrupled in the 2012, and several other firms including Whiptail have made similar announcements in the past few days.