Tintri powers Ireland’s Coal Marketing Company’s virtualised environment

Tintri, Inc. has been selected by Ireland’s Coal Marketing Company (CMC) to underpin CMC’s entire virtualised server and desktop environment. The new solution has completely revolutionised the company’s infrastructure. Simplifying its storage management, increasing the performance of its virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and cutting its SQL reporting times to just a minute.

CMC coordinates the sale and delivery of over 35 million metric tons of coal each year, from the Cerrejón Mine in Colombia to power stations globally. Managing this mission critical activity requires a resilient and highly responsive storage platform to underpin the company’s business operations, from forecasting and logistics, to finance and contract management.

After virtualising its entire infrastructure and installing an enterprise resource planning solution, CMC’s legacy SAN started to struggle. With performance levels dipping and disk space running out, CMC needed a new solution to meet its growing demands. After researching the market, it picked Tintri.

Geoff Grice, IT manager at CMC, said: “Tintri manages the data in a very unique way. It allows us to truly understand the storage required to ensure the best performance for our uses because it works on a per-virtual machine basis. In the twenty-plus years that I have been in IT, I would rate Tintri as one of the simplest systems to set up”

CMC has installed three Tintri VMstore T540 storage arrays – two for the company’s Dublin headquarters, and one for its remote location in Atlanta, USA. It also uses Tintri ReplicateVM to copy the data between the arrays. The benefits of the Tintri system for the VDI setup were so compelling that CMC has now expanded the deployment significantly to manage its Microsoft Exchange 2010 HA cluster, SQL reporting and document management systems.

Grice concluded: “Across the board we are seeing significant performance improvements on the Tintiri platform. The Microsoft SQL reports now only take one minute. Moving everything to Tintri also increased the response times on some of our older systems. The entire Tintri experience has been very positive: speedy delivery, very fast installation, and overall great performance.”

Doug Rich, EMEA VP, Tintri said: “Working with CMC has allowed us to put the scope and ability of the Tintri VMstore products to the test. The deployment addressed the mismatch between CMC’s storage and its VMs so we have been able to improve the performance of the company’s IT systems; reducing SQL reporting times and providing the read/write capabilities necessary for CMC’s sales software. This has had a knock-on affect throughout the business and will support the company’s continued expansion.”