WhipTail, a company that claims to have brought the first all-flash based storage arrays to market, says it is expanding aggressively in Europe.
The privately held, venture capital-backed firm relocated its co-founder Brian Feller to VP and general manager EMEA to support its expansion plans.
In a recent interview with CBR, a Whiptail spokesperson claimed the company has around 100 customers worldwide, and "low teens" in Europe.
The firm takes its name from ‘whiptail’ — one of any number of lizards of the family Teiidae, especially of the genus Cnemidophorus, characterised by agility and alertness.
WhipTail says its solid-state storage technology in its flash-based arrays offer performance increases up to 100 times greater than traditional storage solutions. With a deeper investment in the EMEA region, WhipTail says it will build on its success thus far with clients spanning multiple use cases and industry verticals ranging from AMD, inVentiv Health, and Weichert Realty to the UK’s Pensions Trust.
"EMEA is a very important market to WhipTail," said VP and general manager EMEA and co-founder of WhipTail, Brian Feller. "Some of our largest and longest-standing clients and partners are here and we are committing to even more investment in the region, not only with my move to lead WhipTail’s growth strategy, but to significantly increase our presence in the EMEA market and revolutionise the way enterprises architect their storage infrastructure."
The company says using flash instead of more traditional disk drives eliminates Input/Output (IO) bottlenecks that have evolved beyond hard disk drive (HDD) capabilities. It does this by allowing servers to process more data in less time, by delivering 250,000 random write IOs with sub-millisecond response times, ensuring that neither IO contention – nor latency – becomes a costly issue.
WhipTail’s storage technology takes advantage of the promise of multi-level cell (MLC) flash, the solid-state based storage medium normally seen in consumer devices such as smartphones or digital cameras. WhipTail’s spokesperson said a typical array starts at around $70,000 for a 1.5 Terabyte rig.
There are no current integrations into broader management frameworks such as those from BMC, CA or IBM, but the spokesperson said these are on the roadmap so we should "watch this space".
Feller added: "Enterprises are at a critical juncture. IT budgets have been flat or down for several years, yet the biggest spend continues to be the application set that is less than 10% of the datacentre. So the discussion for these applications that require significantly more performance than traditional storage can offer has turned to ‘what is my cost-per-IO’ from cost-per-gig. Our solid-state storage technology offers real-world performance numbers of 250,000 I/Os per second, at a price point that is a fraction of traditional media. This offers distinct and immediate strategic advantages to our clients."
Rivals in this space include Kove, Texas Memory Systems and Violin Memory.
One of the challenges with flash memory is that it degrades when it is written to and read. However WhipTail says its drives will last a minimum of 7.5 years, long enough for most organisations’ storage refresh cycles.
