Kieran Harty, co-founder and chief executive of Tintri, stopped by theCube during  VMworld 2011. He talked about Tintri’s offering, and his outlook for the company.

Harty explained that Tintri developed a new type of NAS device; an appliance specifically designed for virtualized environments. The product only started shipping in April, and is based on flash and SATA – two of the biggest buzz words in the storage world.

“We were constrained by not being able to have control of the SAN, so we had to work with VMware with existing SANs. Essentially what we’ve done is making the network device friendly to virtualization, and we said that that’s the environment in which it needs to work.”

Harty explained the appliance comes with about one terabyte worth of flash, which is optimized via compression, dedupe and working set calculations to have the same value as 8.5 terabyte of flash. He continued to detail the offering’s main advantage is that it was built from the ground up to be installed in the virtualized datacenter: everything is presented as virtual machines and virtual disks, snapshots are taken on a VM level and virtual machine replication is also included. Further, the appliance’s file system is also optimized for that.

Harty compared his product compared to traditional NAS. The latter’s file system is built to process a very large quantity of both small and large files, while in a virtualized deployment you only see a small number of large files that frequently access metadata – which is what Tibtri was aiming for. The company’s goal is to solve the whole problem of making legacy storage virtualization friendly, rather than offering a temporary fix.

Near the end of the interview, the chief executive started discussing about his company. Tibtri is still a relatively new player that received funding from NEA, and is headed in a different direction than 3PAR and other storage vendors that have been recently bought out, according to its CEO.