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Dust yourself off and Tin-try again: DDN buys Tintri biz remains for $60m

Will hire 100 heads, add NVMe to line

DDN is forking out more than $60m for Tintri's business and will begin supporting the trembling, sweaty owners of the bankrupted firm's arrays this week, it confirmed today.

The plan is to hire 100 new bodies before year end to populate global engineering, support, field technical, sales and marketing teams at "Tintri by DDN", which is the new division that failed Tintri will morph into. We don’t yet know who will lead this division.

DDN has already begun flogging the bankrupt business's entire product line, including the EC6000 and T1000 all-flash arrays and the hybrid flash T800 series.

The buy is the firm's ticket into the enterprise virtual array market. The announcement comes after DDN won a six-round auction - against unknown bidders – and gained widely expected approval for the transaction.

Co-founder and president at DDN, Paul Bloch, popped open a can to emit this quote: “We started hiring ex-Tintri team members weeks before knowing the outcome of the Tintri auction and made large investments in what became a very successful VMworld trade show in August.“

He added that a new product roadmap would be announced within 90 days, with DDN wanting to expand the portfolio in areas such as – as you'd imagine – predictive analytics, virtualised environment acceleration and efficient provisioning, database enhancements, NVMe support and storage platform expansion.

Tintri went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy after running out of money following a troubled IPO. The firm's VVOL-like tech initially stole a lead on array rivals but they caught up fast using VMware VVOLs, and then surged past with their all-flash arrays and better cloud support. Companion startups Tegile and Nimble were acquired by Western Digital and HPE respectively.

DDN, a maker of HPC storage systems for academia, the public sector and enterprises, signalled its asset acquisition intentions early and prevailed over other bidders.

Tintri reported a $157.7m loss on $125.9m in revenues in fiscal 2018, 49 per cent deeper than its $105.8m loss on revenues of $125.1m in fiscal '17.

The pre-Chapter 11 Tintri execs were co-founder and CTO Kieran Harty, co-founder and chief architect Mark Gritter, and EVP Operations Doug Kahn. One or more or all might be in place.

According to DDN, its newly acquired unit has software for “server virtualisation, DevOps and VDI. Capabilities include 10X speed up of VM migration, cloning and refresh of terabyte-sized databases within seconds, storage vMotion enablement with zero load on the host, and handling of thousands of VMs in a single datastore.”

Unified management is provided through Tintri Global Center and real-time and predictive analytics is provided via Tintri Analytics.

We should get a sight of the product roadmap in early December and that may provide indications of Tintri’s hardware and software future. ®

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