Tintri Inc., one of the faster growing names in the new generation of storage vendors to have emerged from the solid-state memory craze, is extending its reach beyond the customer base of VMware Inc. with a major software upgrade that takes aim at the enterprise capabilities helping to keep the incumbents in place.

Led by Wind River Systems Inc. founder Ken Klein, the six-year-old Tintri offers a hybrid array that marries traditional mechanical disk with speedy flash drives to achieve a middle-ground between performance and price. That value proposition is appealing for several fast-growing use cases, most notably virtual desktop infrastructure and analytical environments that combine historical data with real-time streams.

The company sets itself apart from other hybrid appliance vendors such as Tegile Inc. and Nimble Storage Inc. through tight integration with the virtualization layer that allows admins to manage their installations without having to worry about the messy details of the underlying hardware. The secret sauce to that abstraction is the homegrown Tintri OS, which has been extended as part of this morning’s upgrades to support virtual environments powered by Red Inc.’s commercial distribution of the KVM hypervisor included in the Linux kernel.

The integration, which arrives two months later than Klein predicted in an April interview, enables Tintri to better target the over 65 percent of organizations that employ more than one hypervisor, a capability set to expand further with the addition of support for Microsoft Corp.’s rivaling Hyper-V due later this year. The enhancement also allows the firm to reach the much smaller but still significant number of customers running exclusively on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.

The other, and most notable reason, Tintri has thrown its weight behind RHEV is the fact that it’s an essential component of the Linux powerhouse’s successfully OpenStack offering, which has emerged as one of the frontrunners in the distribution wars.The company’s storage operating system is not yet compatible with the free platform, but the new release offers some some consolation in the form of integration with Microsoft Active Directory and LDAP services that make it possibles for customers to check user permissions against their existing registries before granting access.

The enhancement marks another step forward in the maturation of Tintri’s management stack. Further advancing the company’s value proposition  is the addition of centralized monitoring and reporting  capabilities to its complementary Tintri Global Center, which now allows admins to track their environments from the same place they’re provisioning them. And rounding out today’s announcement is a brand new Automation Toolkit that enables practitioners to eliminate repetitive manual tasks with pre-programmed workflows.

Image via Tintri