Great shame...
Unfortunately, the storage market has been saturated for the past 10 years, with every start-up offering a very small unique selling point, but few had enough to distinguish themselves from the rest of the pack.. Pile on top of this, Tier-1 vendors (HP, Dell EMC etc) guard their turf with jealousy, even willing to sell at a loss just to keep market share.
I've looked at both Tintri and Nimble several times over the years, all gooey eyed at their marvellous products (and they are good!). But as a former IT manager for SME's (Now turncoat, and work in Security), this type of kit is a huge investment, yet I was asking the company to trust my judgement, and each time, I asked myself two questions -
Will the vendor be around over the next 3-5 years? (Which is operational the shelf life)
Can the vendor realistically deliver a robust 24/7 4hr support?
And every-time, I came same conclusion - "Maybe they could". But that it self was not good enough, the answer had to be an emphatic "Yes" to both.
In hindsight, I reckon the board at Tintri were probably kicking themselves for not flashing (pun intended) the Tier-1 vendors their assets and cashing out.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
