As a presales systems engineer working for WHIPTAIL, my job crosses a lot of functional groups within the company.  It’s my job to figure out how to best help our customers apply the technology built into our products to solve not only technical, but also business, problems.  I also have the luxury of advance view into our product roadmaps and help to shape to best fit our current customers, future customer needs and the industry trends.  With a select group of customers we’ve been sharing these roadmaps to not only get insight to their thoughts on where we think it’s best to head, but also figure out what types of advanced problems we can apply our solution sets.

One of the most popular questions I’ve gotten after running through the INVICTA product and roadmap has been: “The performance numbers with even a single ACCELA array are extremely impressive, and with a fully populated INVICTA chassis they’re outside of what I ever thought possible.  So… what do you use all that horsepower for?”

That’s a great question.  INVICTA at launch supports up to six 2U Silicon Storage Nodes supporting 7GB/s and more than 600,000 IOPS, all at latency numbers measured in microseconds, and not milliseconds.

What DO you use that for?

VDI for many customers has been a great idea in concept, but the cost to build storage to meet the performance numbers demanded by a VDI infrastructure often stalls the project.  We’ve been able to meet that need in the past with our 2U stand-alone array.  But, as customers start scaling past the thousands and into the tens of thousands of desktops, complexity becomes an issue.  Imagine the ability to support the performance needs of more than 12,000 desktops from a single storage system that sits in a 14U footprint – that’s INVICTA.

Elsewhere in the data center, other applications also drive incredible amounts of transactions and IO, and the gaps between the application processing and the storage performance continue to widen.  Performance numbers for systems hosting databases are measured in the number of transactions per second (IOPS), and those transactions are very often limited by how long it takes to write that data to a storage medium (latency).  While the IO per second numbers we can deliver with INVICTA are impressive, what that translates to for a customer is the sheer number of transactions that database may be able to service in a minute, or an hour, or a day.  From a single INVICTA unit, it’s possible to support the transaction load driving hundreds of millions, if not a billion or more, transactions in a single day.  Those numbers, with a very flat latency at 200 microseconds, could very well mean the difference between thousands of concurrent customers processing a transaction to closure or losing their patience and moving on to your closest competitor.

Other customers use solid state less for the transactional loads and more for movement of sheer volumes of data.  The fact that INVICTA can support multiple GigaBYTE transfer rates means tremendous things in areas, to name just a few, like medicine (where doctors may require high resolution stills and video instantly to save a patient), video processing (to service extremely high performance rendering operations), data and number crunching (for high performance computing clusters), and data streaming (high resolution sensors, audio and video caching).  To put it in perspective, a single INVICTA cluster supports the transfer of about two full-length DVDs per second.  If you’re familiar with streaming movies from your favorite pay-per-month service, imagine streaming more than 10,000 of them at the same time from a single storage system.  INVICTA can support those types of workloads.

All of the use cases I’ve mentioned above are use cases we’ve already helped customers with, or customers have come to us with those scales of problems to look for a solution.  All of them are incredibly exciting opportunities to let us take the training wheels off of INVICTA and prove what it’s capable of.  But, the most exciting thing for me as a presales engineer will be all of the things we haven’t even thought of yet we’ll now be able to address because the storage performance in the data center is no longer the problem.

Imagine if the storage response time was the furthest thing from your mind in YOUR data center.  How would that change things for you?  If you’re intrigued, let us know.  The possibilities may surprise you.

WHIPTAIL’s new family of products comes to market at a time when all companies are 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.

“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 new products do.”

INVICTA: Radically Different, Scale-­Out, Multi Role, Multi Tenant, Multi Protocol
WHIPTAIL’s INVICTA is the first true enterprise class, scale­‐out, highly available, modular and multi protocol 100% NAND flash storage array ever constructed. With INVICTA, WHIPTAIL is delivering the next generation silicon storage array that provides highly scalable IOPS, extreme bandwidth, and ultra low latency at groundbreaking price/performance when compared to performance optimized HDD solutions. 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:

• Up to 72 TB of NAND Flash capacity
• Sustained bandwidth beyond 6 GB/s
• Sustained IOPS beyond 600,000
• Nearly undetectable latency, in a multi tenant, multi protocol environment
• Scale out modular design allows capacity and performance to be added with ease
• Complete backward compatibility with all previous WHIPTAIL systems
• Highly available Silicon Storage Router TM manages host connectivity and data protection
• Multi­‐protocol flexibility, supporting FC, iSCSI, FCoE, IB SRP and NFS
• New high availability options, including low latency protected write cache
• Asynchronous replication and Snapshots
• Industry leading NFS performance
• Complete management from within VMWare vCenter and full support for VAAI
• 1400 watts in 14 rack units, lowering energy use by 90 percent, compared to legacy HDD

ACCELA – Delivering New Features
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, the product offers total investment protection and is designed to be easily merged into WHIPTAIL’s INVICTA modular scale out storage array.

“What I like most about WHIPTAIL’s family of products is the scalability and investment protection it offers. A customer can support their current needs with a stand‐alone ACCELA system, and then later as they get off the ground with a virtualization or cloud deployment they can scale to INVICTA to meet their growing performance needs,” said Henry Baltazar, storage and systems, 451 Research Group. “While each system is designed to meet specific customer needs, they also work together perfectly and pack a mean punch to overall application performance.”

RACERUNNER Features and Updates
Both ACCELA and INVICTA are powered by RACERUNNER, WHIPTAIL’s industry leading software architecture, leveraging advanced techniques to optimize high throughput around NAND flash for all block and file protocols.

ACCELA, a technology update to the company’s pioneering and best selling XLR8R, revolutionizes
the performance of databases, virtualized infrastructure and applications.

• Connectivity – Fibre Channel, FCoE, Infiniband SRP, iSCSI, NFS, CIFS
• Protection – Enhanced NAND optimized parity RAID, LUN mirroring
• Performance – LUN striping, Snapshots
• Replication – synchronous and asynchronous

Product Support
WHIPTAIL’s family of products is Citrix and VMware certified. WHIPTAIL provides global 24/7 world­‐class service and support for its customers, with four­‐hour response time and pre-­positioned spares in most parts of the world.

Where to See INVICTA
The WHIPTAIL team will be demonstrating the power of INVICTA at the Synergy show in San Francisco from May 8‐10 at booth #409. Media should contact Micaela Whalen at (312) 961-­3225 to set up an appointment or stop by the booth for an INVICTA demonstration.

About WHIPTAIL
WHIPTAIL commercialized the first NAND Flash Silicon Storage Array (SSA), which dramatically improves application performance while consuming less energy than legacy storage arrays. Installed worldwide, WHIPTAIL’s systems enable databases, virtualized and online environments to process more data in significantly less time. WHIPTAIL’s customers experience substantial operational improvements because data processing time shrinks from days to hours or hours to minutes. Move your data at the speed of life at www.whiptail.com.

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