The sign along the roads in some suburbs says SPEED KILLS. But what kills an enterprise network these days is trying to move data fast enough in virtualised environments, or in heavy video environments, or in Big Data applications (where you are under pressure to make rapid decisions on what the data is telling you).
In the avenues and lanes around the data centre, those road signs should read: SPEED SAVES.
Whiptail, maker of high performance 100% solid state silicon storage arrays, launches Invicta with up to 72TB of NAND Flash capacity of next gen silicon storage array that provides highly scalable IOPS (beyond 600,000), extreme bandwidth (beyond 6 GB/s), symmetric read/write, and ultra low latency in a multi tenant, multi protocol environment.
“It delivers the highest sustained write throughput in the industry, which is critical for high velocity Big Data. Supporting all standard storage networking and file protocols, it introduces many new enterprise features, as well as unprecedented investment protection,” notes Brian Feller, VP Sales & Marketing at Whiptail.
Enterprise features include management from within VMWare vCenter, support for VAAI and Whiptail’s Silicon Storage Router that manages host connectivity and data protection, and more.
There’s also Data Protection that ensures continuous access to data while protecting against power outages, hardware or site failure.
But the heart of Invicta (and Whiptail itself) is performance: the key to success in today’s world of storage server sprawl is higher performance for VDI, Big Data and cloud computing.
“When you start clustering, it’s the law of diminishing return,” says Feller.
“For example, for a high frequency trader,” explains Feller, “little bits of lost time cost real money.” Financial markets require low latency, particularly where trading based on algorithms will process market updates and turn-around orders within milliseconds.
Websites like gaming or application databases depend upon low latency or video streaming that depends upon high bandwidth: these are other examples of applications that need accelerated performance.“Network managers who have the job to back-up their systems, where sometimes it seems like they are jamming elephants into ant holes, can now finish their batch loads in a fraction of the time.”
Speed is what it is all about. But then you also need scalability. Backward compatible with all previous Whiptail systems, Invicta features a modular design that allows capacity and performance to be easily added.
One additional benefit that captures European attention, explains Feller, is lower energy consumption. With 1400 watts in 14 rack units, Invicta will lower energy use by 90% compared to legacy HDD.
“We’re pretty overwhelmed by the initial reaction from European channel partners,” notes Feller. “In our business, we are never demand-constrained as there are always people who buy performance.”
“Often they want to jump in 100%, but we have to first stop and understand what the partner does well,” he adds. Whiptail has recently opened its European office in the UK.
In another announcement, Whiptail's Accela is a technology update to the company’s pioneering and best-selling XLR8R.This is a NAND flash silicon storage array with no moving parts, low power consumption and low heat generation. Performance specs include: 250,000 Write IO, 200,000 Read IO, 1.9GB/s throughput and 100 milliseconds latency.
Supporting all standard storage networking and file protocols, Accela’s key features include RAID protection, hot spares, and asynchronous replication, and has options such as protected write buffers and complete VMWare vCenter management, including the industry’s first complete implementation of native VAAI.
And, by leveraging the Invicta-ready option, Accela offers investment protection and is designed to be easily merged into Whiptail’s Invicta modular scale-out storage array.
Both Accela and Invicta are powered by Racerunner, Whiptail’s software architecture, leveraging advanced techniques to optimise high throughput around NAND flash for all block and file protocols.
Go Whiptail
