Whiptail builds highly-engineered, solid-state flash storage systems that are hundreds of thousands of times faster than traditional magnetic disk storage systems. Whiptail was founded in 2008 to commercialize flash memory as an alternative to hard disks in large-scale storage systems. Whiptail's all-flash storage arrays provide extreme performance improvements over hard disk drives by using solid-state drives and a proprietary operating system optimized for flash memory.
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Who is #WHIPTAIL
1. WhipTail · 888.550.8136 · www.whiptail.com
What does WHIPTAIL do?
Brief Description
of our Product
Background, History,
Philosophy
Why WHIPTAIL is the
Ideal Storage Solution
CONTENTS
WHO IS WHIPTAIL?
WHITE PAPER
What does WHIPTAIL do?
WHIPTAIL builds highly-engineered, super high-performance data storage
systems out of solid-state Flash components. Our basic engineering is
organized around, and very specific to, the way Flash memory behaves. It bears
very little similarity to the way traditional magnetic mechanical disk subsystems
have been designed for the past 30 years. There is a material difference in the
way we manage data inside a storage subsystem.
WHIPTAIL designed and commercialized the use of NAND Flash memory as
a direct replacement for hard disks in large-scale storage systems. WHIPTAIL
engineered the product to enable customers to perform a swap of our
equipment for existing equipment in the simplest, least disruptive way possible
to achieve radical improvement for overall system performance.
WHIPTAIL is unique in that we build traditional-functioning storage subsystems,
but they are hundreds of thousands of times faster than magnetic mechanical-
based systems. The arbitration mechanism WHIPTAIL uses is exactly the
opposite of the arbitration mechanism that magnetic mechanical disks use,
in which huge amounts of data are chopped up into tiny bits and sent out to
hundreds of thousands of disks simultaneously. WHIPTAIL has designed an
extremely sophisticated control plane that arbitrates data to significantly fewer
solid-state drives (SSDs) at IO and bandwidth rates orders of magnitude faster,
measuring latency orders of magnitude smaller.
WHIPTAIL developed a scalable product that can be seamlessly integrated to
work with any application used in the enterprise. Unlike many competitors,
WHIPTAIL‘s product can run in existing SAN architecture, rather than forcing
a change of system to fit the storage array. The WHIPTAIL array is tuned to
reduce latency in high IO environments and possesses a proprietary operating
system designed to overcome the write performance and longevity challenges
typically associated with MLC flash.
DATA AT THE SPEED OF LIFE
2. WhipTail · 888.550.8136 · www.whiptail.com
Brief Description of our Product
WHIPTAIL commercialized the first all-flash enterprise
storage array to address performance issues in data
centers. Installed worldwide in numerous mission-
critical database, virtualization and online environments,
WHIPTAIL’s solid-state storage dramatically reduces
delays related to hard disk contention and access times,
allowing servers to process more data in dramatically
less time – months to days, hours to minutes. Since 2009,
customers have relied on WHIPTAIL’s flash-based arrays
for extreme IOPS, bandwidth and latency, optimizing
performance of key business functions and bringing
modern performance-demanding applications to life.
In late 2008, WHIPTAIL released the XLR8r SSD storage
array, a platform that found a natural fit and success in
virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments, but also
helped customers with highly transactional workloads
as well as those with the need for high-performance
applications and mission-critical databases. In May 2012,
WHIPTAIL launched ACCELA, the next generation of the
world’s most widely deployed all-flash storage array, and
INVICTA, the first true enterprise class, scale-out, highly
available, modular and multi-protocol 100% NAND flash
storage array ever constructed, which provides highly
scalable IOPS, extreme bandwidth, and ultra-low latency
at groundbreaking performance and price.
Supporting all standard storage networking and file
protocols, ACCELA’s key features include RAID protection,
hot spares, and asynchronous replication, and options
such as protected write buffers and complete VMWare
vCenter management (including the industry’s first
complete implementation of native VAAI). By leveraging
the INVICTA-ready option, ACCELA offers total investment
protection and is designed to merge easily into the
INVICTA modular scale-out storage array.
The products are completely scalable. A mid-market
customer can begin with ACCELA and later easily grow
into INVICTA to provide linear capacity and performance
as the needs of the application dictate. Even within the
INVICTA chassis, a customer can add a total of seven
modules as “building blocks” to accommodate evolving
data needs.
WHIPTAIL’s new family of products provides a solution
for companies struggling with the ramifications of moving
data fast enough in virtualized environments, Big Data
applications and continued pressure to make rapid
decisions. Technology that can increase performance in
these arenas is in strong demand. WHIPTAIL’s second-
generation family of products, ACCELA and INVICTA,
provide the speed, reliability and scalability required by
today’s and tomorrow’s enterprise infrastructure.
Background, History, Philosophy
In 2008, IT consultant James Candelaria founded New
Jersey-based WHIPTAIL, named after the whiptail
racerunner lizard, an extremely fast species indigenous to
the southwestern United States.
James, now WHIPTAIL’s Chief Technology Officer,
observed his enterprise clients pouring more and more
money into hard disk storage but achieving minimal
performance improvement. Hard disk drives (HDDs)
are completely overprovisioned and have outlived their
practicality for high performance applications. To that
end, James developed a solution using NAND Flash
drives coupled with a unique patented operating system.
Targeting the most demanding and costly applications,
this led to a transformation of the storage industry. Big
Data, virtualization and cloud computing demand high
performance storage solutions. WHIPTAIL’s silicon storage
arrays offer unsurpassed speed and response times,
providing data at the speed of life.
All technology infrastructure is intended to support
applications and application functionality that provides
some business value. Over the past decade, CPUs have
become faster, memory has become faster and the
distance between disk performance and the performance
of everything else has created a bottleneck to which
businesses have reluctantly become accustomed. If only
the disk portion is replaced with something significantly
faster, everything becomes faster, because all individual
components (e.g., CPUs, memory, networks) now have
greatly accelerated response time.
In the 21st century, a slow response time leads to what has
become known as “website abandonment.” Customers
visit a website to select a product, click a link to process
their credit card information for a purchase and are
greeted by the little spinning wheel indicating slow
processing of their personal information. The customer
3. WhipTail · 888.550.8136 · www.whiptail.com
quickly loses faith in that website and moves on to the
next website that offers the same product or service.
The result is a lost sale or a frustrated customer, neither
of which is a value-added proposition. The potential
customer will not visit the website again because of the
negative experience. The bottom line is that there is
no such thing as a slow server, a slow network, or slow
memory…there is only slow storage.
Website abandonment due to slow storage
WHIPTAIL has found a unique way to address the
bottlenecks that have evolved beyond HDD capabilities.
Why WHIPTAIL is the ideal
storage solution
A typical commercial website for a financial institution has
200,000-500,000 concurrent users looking at data, and
approximately 10 million account holders looking at data.
If a customer submits a stock transaction and expects it to
be processed before the market closes at 4:00, incredibly
slow storage capabilities can prevent the completion
of the batch process by the end of the business day
potentially causing the customer unintended financial
consequences. In this example, the difference between a
10 millisecond response time and a sub-second response
time is huge to that waiting customer.
Unlike spinning hard disks that read and write data
magnetically, an SSD reads and writes to a medium called
NAND Flash memory. Flash memory is non-volatile, which
means that it does not lose its contents when it loses
power (unlike the DRAM used in computer memory). Flash
memory is what lives inside smartphones, mp3 players
and USB Flash drives. What makes an SSD so much faster
than a commercial USB flash drive is a combination of how
the NAND chips are addressed and the various caching
and computing shortcuts that the built-in controller of an
SSD uses to read and write data. A growing trend over the
past decade is to keep data in memory, and NAND flash is
closer to memory speed than any mechanical disk could
ever be.
Storage is typically the most challenging element
of VDI deployments. Small, random WRITE IO requests
push traditional HDD storage to the limit during normal
operations. While it is commonly acknowledged that
silicon storage array performance is measurably superior
to that of spinning disks, less well known is the importance
of silicon storage being properly integrated into the overall
VDI solution. WHIPTAIL meets this expectation and builds
its storage solutions to efficiently handle high demand
VDI applications at a fraction of mainstream storage
vendor costs.
WHIPTAIL’s ACCELA comprises an array of SSDs, does
not include spinning disks and is built from fewer parts.
Compared to an HDD, the SSD provides incredible
increases in performance (nearly 30x faster),
a dramatically lower total cost of ownership and
increased durability.
At a high level, WHIPTAIL products dramatically accelerate
the delivery of enterprise data, provide 90% savings
for on-going energy costs and offer a 70% reduction in
data-center footprint as opposed to traditional magnetic
spinning disk storage. As compared to its competitors,
WHIPTAIL has created a product that is easily attainable
for an IT infrastructure in relation to the amount of
performance that results from the investment.
“Given the comprehensiveness of the interfaces and
protocols we support out of the box, not only does
WHIPTAIL plug into existing environments, but it
can support the growing high IO environments that
enterprises are adopting over the next five years. This
value is something that seems so obvious but that is often
overlooked within the industry” according to Brian Feller,
VP and General Manager of EMEA at WHIPTAIL.
“Incredibly fast is what Flash is all about – and no one
knows Flash better than us,” said Dan Crain, CEO,
WHIPTAIL. “Our new family of products are market-
changing – both for us, and for the companies that use
them. Imagine running financial reports or pulling research
data in minutes instead of hours. Letting business reclaim
time, that’s what our products do.”
