Disk is dead.
That's the way the world looks when you've making The World's First All Flash-Based Array.
There's no pity for the death of disk in the voice of Brian Feller, VP Sales & Marketing for Whiptail. Interviewed in their new London office, Feller talks about the rise of 100% solid state storage arrays and storage problems in data centres today.
You can add park more and more servers in the server parks but you can't drive the full value of virtualization. Not without accelerated performance
Whiptail commercialized the first NAND Flash Silicon Storage Array (SSA). Whiptail's SSAs enable databases, virtualized and online environments to process more data in significantly less time. The end user sees data processing time shrink from days to hours or hours to minutes. And while application performance improves, you still consume less energy than legacy storage arrays.
Let's put it this way: it's like buying a much faster car, one that responds well to the lightest touch, and yet it uses less gas than the clunker you were driving.
Websites like gaming or application databases especially need the low latency that comes from accelerated performance, from speed. Video streaming needs high bandwidth. End users often need a solution that enables 250 simultaneous users but can scale to thousands of simultaneous users. And all this need for speed and headroom comes with a demand for savings against rising storage budgets and rocketing energy costs.
For example, universities benefit from VDI computing because their large user populations need immediate access to the same networks and resources. Yet it's often possible that a university running its campus kiosks and computer labs on a VMware View environment using Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) architecture can experience significant data bottlenecks and access delays. These problems, common to large VDI deployments employing disk storage, have proliferated with the trend for virtualization...but many users discovered this only after they have employed virtualization.
Whiptail proposes their silicon storage array as the hub for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) workload. This solution fits into any existing VDI environment, delivers improved data velocity, efficiency and convenience. Data flows with immediate response times and the environment is easily scalable to more than 1000 simultaneous users.
Whiptail's silicon storage array runs on less than 200 watts and supports up to 12TB of MLC flash with 250,000 IOs in a small 2U array, fully populated by cost-effective MLC flash drives. The Whiptail array is tuned to reduce latency in high I/O environments and possesses a proprietary operating system designed to overcome the write performance and longevity challenges typically associated with MLC flash.
"Our success in America is due to channel. We're offering them a way to solve a real pain point that their customers feel. Channel like Whiptail because we fit into the current ecosystem, instead of trying to reinvent the data centres," says Feller. "Storage went from 30% of IT budgets in 2005 to 70%. And with Whiptail, our partners can take out a huge chunk of that storage spend. We're talking from both cost and performance perspective."
"How can partners differentiate themselves? Some resellers are still trying to sell more and more disks. Our partners are selling a well-defined storage solution."
Feller has recently moved from US to open the European office in UK and find regional directors in Germany, France...The company is currently interviewing partners across Europe, from Malta to Finland, from Ireland to CIS.
