In the current economic climate, successful construction businesses have increasingly invested in software solutions to automate manual processes (e.g., estimating, job cost accounting, project management) and increase revenue without driving up overhead costs and putting the bottom line at risk. Decision makers are evaluating existing technology to determine whether the company is leveraging all features and functionality to ensure optimal productivity and profitability.

Advancements in communications have made information about the construction market and changing regulations instantly available in a form that can be effectively assimilated and used for decision making and now enable the field crew to access updated project data via a mobile device. Contractors can quickly and accurately answer customer questions while at the jobsite, saving significant time. Anyone on the team can easily produce, organize, route and manage project documents and can create alerts to identify overdue items and meet deadlines.

As a rapidly maturing technology, many in the construction industry have turned to virtualization to keep a lid on spiraling IT costs without losing control over their data. More than ever, the enterprise data center is essential to provide a strong and secure base for information and knowledge storage and distribution.

Running a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and database applications on WHIPTAIL’s high-performance, energy-efficient silicon storage arrays allow servers to process more data in less time. WHIPTAIL’s Flash-based silicon storage solutions offer unsurpassed levels of performance and ultra-low latency that ensures rapid response times for processing and real-time analysis of industry trends, while supporting hundreds to thousands of users simultaneously. WHIPTAIL’s performance metrics are perfectly suited for VDI and far exceed traditional HDD (100 times the IOPS). WHIPTAIL’s products prevent current and future performance issues caused by bottlenecks and resource contention by removing VDI’s high demand IO profile from the general storage infrastructure.

Operational efficiency is the name of the construction game. WHIPTAIL products dramatically accelerate the delivery of 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. We’ve created products that are easily attainable for an IT infrastructure in relation to the amount of performance that results from the investment.

By optimizing existing technology solutions with WHIPTAIL, construction executives can run their businesses more effectively, streamline processes, reduce expenses and anticipate profit in a difficult economy.

The post Construction appeared first on WHIPTAIL.

To further that effort, we’ve launched two communities: one in Google and the other in LinkedIn. Both are called the Application Design and Deployment in Flash Environment groups. Now these groups are not about us. These groups are about how do we go about rethinking the deployment of applications for flash.

Inside of these groups we’re looking to foster a whole set of conversations, really look at the way customers in the past have organized their applications to, say, avoid writing because it was painful, and now what we can do to engage it because it’s becomes easy. Really begin to think how we can consolidate databases or, even more importantly in some cases, consolidate a process inside of a database, i.e., let’s do a batch while doing a backup for example. So I encourage you and welcome you to join us in these two communities. We look forward to your comments and your conversations. Thank you.

The post Announcing the Application Design and Deployment in Flash Environments Groups appeared first on WHIPTAIL.

The Goal
WHIPTAIL Labs, tasked with rethinking the deployment of real-world applications to better exploit the performance characteristics of WHIPTAIL flash arrays, asked themselves three questions:
• How much data can a single instance of Oracle support?
• How fast can it load multiple tables from a single file?
• How fast can it load multiple tables from multiple files?

5 Easy Steps
1. Build Your Environment

• Two Brocade 300s
  8GB/24 Port
• Fibre Channel Connections
• Xeon E7 Intel Based Server
  32 Logical CPUs
  128GB Ram
  Qlogic 2Port 8GB HBA

2. Attach Your Storage

• WHIPTAIL INVICTA All-Flash Array
  Dual Routers
  Four 6 TB Nodes
• Create a Lun on each Node

3. Configure Your OS – Oracle | Linux 6.3

• MPIO
  path_grouping_policy: multibus
  /*Active/Active*/
• Linux Boot
  2.6.39-300.28.1.el6uek.x86_64
  numa=off
  elevator=noop
• Disks
  nr_requests: 4096
  read_ahead_kb: 4096

4. Configure Your Database – Oracle 11g

• Default Settings Except for
  Asynch IO
• 1 Tablespace per Lun
  Oracle System Activity on Tablespace 1

5. Load Using Data Pump for Oracle

The Test
WHIPTAIL Labs ran data pump for a single 100GB file (1 billion rows of data with 11 unique attributes) reading from one INVICTA node to another ten times. They then expanded the Oracle instance to two table loads on two different nodes, reading from the same file concurrently, again running it multiple times. Next they added a third node and third table load for a total of 3 billion rows being processed concurrently from a single source file. But they weren’t done yet, the lab re-ran their tests with multiple source files, again building from 100GB to 300GB total. You can see the results on the next page.

Test Environment

Results

*A peak throughput of 5.6GB was observed and documented with 5GB/s Write and 600MB/s Read concurrently.

The Take Away
You will notice that the time to load did not increase proportionate to the increase in the volume of data. In fact, relative to typical load times for files 100GB or larger, the amount of time it took to load additional data was minor.

This is due in part to WHIPTAIL’s scale-out architecture. By distributing the flash management, power, and RAID resources on each node, INVICTA is able to give dedicated service to each tablespace within the Oracle instance. That means there is zero conflict for IOPs or throughput, and Oracle is able to scale to meet the growing demands of business.

For the database administrator the impact is significant. INVICTA creates the ability to consolidate large databases under a single Oracle instance without concern for degrading performance.

Observations and Tips

• In the first three tests, we observed that as the number of writers requesting data from the same file increased, the read throughput decreased. Because the writers were asking for the same data, requests could be serviced directly from cache and therefor the read throughput from the file itself was lower.
• In the fourth run, loading from two files to two tablespaces, there was a marked improvement in overall run time and throughput, as the system had sufficient resources to service concurrent read & write requests.
• By the final run, it became evident that our environment was constrained by the operating system on the server. Linux simply did not have enough resources to read and write three large files simultaneously.
• To remove that constraint, you could opt to architect your solution with additional resources.
• The question to ask yourself is; When was the last time your storage was able to push the boundaries of your processors?

The post How to Bulk Load 3 Billion Rows of Data in About 5 Minutes appeared first on WHIPTAIL.

Today we’re very happy to launch the first of a series of notes that will appear on our website. In this particular note we’re going to demonstrate to you the ability to load billions of records in just a matter of minutes. It’s not that these are really small records–we’re talking about 100 gigabytes of data for about a billion records. Those records represent something that resembles census information, and so this will give you an opportunity to understand how you could organize a database and get extraordinary throughput. Not all databases are made the same and the notes will reflect that as well. What you’ll begin to find in today’s notes, for example, is about two to three pages outlining the steps that we took, the systems that we used, how we organized the array, which is very simple as a matter of fact, and how we organized the database around the array, and then the tool that we used, which you would be able to use in order to execute the load.

Now here’s the best part. We’re also going to make available to you the output of our tests. You’ll be able to see the log files that were generated, IO stat information, any screen captures that we’ve done and we’ll make that available. And, we’re doing this because we want to begin to solicit a whole new way of thinking about how applications can be organized specifically for flash. We also want your comments. We want to hear what you think, and certainly we want to know what kinds of notes you’d like to see. In the coming weeks you will see us do work on Oracle, Microsoft, Postgres, MongoDb. We’re looking into Hadoop. We’re looking at doing work with NoSQL. We’re looking at doing work with all kinds of other systems, and so we’re very excited about this initiative. We’re very excited to share it with you, and now on to the first note.

The post Beyond the Benchmarks with WHIPTAIL Lab Notes appeared first on WHIPTAIL.

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Register here.

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Throughout the webinar we polled attendees on their thoughts about Gary’s TCO model, if they are currently using flash and predictions for the HDD performance market. Here are the results:

After reviewing the results, Gary said, “The results of our TCO survey indicate to me that storage buyers still do not have a handle on how to justify the extra upfront cost of an all-flash array vs. traditional HDD for a performance environment. Purchase price is only one dimension of storage cost. Keeping HDD available and running over a period of 3 to 5 years is much more costly than a comparably powered flash array and offsets any upfront savings.”

Let us know your thoughts in the comments and by voting in the below polls:

The post Webinar Recap: Calculating the True TCO for Performance Storage appeared first on WHIPTAIL.

Let us know your thoughts by voting in the below polls:

The post Calculating the True TCO for Performance Storage appeared first on WHIPTAIL.

Join WHIPTAIL’s CMO Max Riggsbee and Parity Research Founder Gary MacFadden as they discuss Parity’s ground-breaking research on the true total cost of ownership (TCO) for performance-centric storage arrays. This 30 minute webinar, plus Q&A, will cover key findings from MacFadden’s white paper, Taking a Closer Look at Data Storage TCO.

Key findings to be covered include:

• Why HDD arrays cost almost twice as much to maintain over 5 years than a comparable SSD array
• Why HDD arrays take up 8 times more physical space than a Flash array
• How HDD arrays consume almost 10 times the power of Flash arrays
• Why administrative costs are almost 500% higher with HDD
• Why HDD deployment costs are more than 5 times the cost of deploying SSD Flash.
• How One 6-terabyte SSD Flash Array can replace 480 short-stroked HDDs with 50x reduction in latency
• Why capacity and IOPS are inadequate tools for measuring performance-centric data storage TCO

The post Webinar: Calculating the True TCO for Performance Storage appeared first on WHIPTAIL.

What if your Exchange, SQL and Oracle Databases, VDI, Server Virtualization, and Mission Critical Revenue Generating Application workloads could operate faster to handle today’s demands and tomorrow’s expectations?

Let Cornerstone and WHIPTAIL show you how to reap the benefits of today’s solid-state storage. Join us for a luncheon workshop and learn about solid-state storage arrays that offer the performance and scalability to help drive your business to its full potential.

We will cover:
·Increasing demand for data velocity
·Righting the IO imbalance
·Accelerating Workloads
·Customer Stories
·Q&A Session

Register here.

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Symmetry Affects Performance
Writes are important, more important than many realize. One of the most common practices in storage design is to say, “OK, let me look at my application and its IO profile.” This is a critical step, but its results are often misinterpreted. The goal is to understand how that application works, how much time does it write, how much time does it read and so on for the entire lifecycle of the data. Some applications spend more time doing one activity versus the other and we often make assumptions regarding the importance of write IOPS if our write activity is less than 50%.

Let’s say I’ve done my IO evaluation and I’ve discovered my application writes 30% of the time and reads 70%. I may think write symmetry with respect to performance does not matter, but that is not actually the case. I have to consider the criticality of that particular write operation.

As a hypothetical IO analysis let’s consider a banking application that produces account activity statements at the end of each month for all customers, which is required by bank regulations. The application is going to go through everybody’s accounts, total them up, summarize them and store that summarized data in the form of the month-end statement. For most of the month the database of record is writing far less of the time than it is reading.

Let’s dig in to the data collection used by the application.  If I have 50 million accounts with an average of 25-50 transactions per month, I get 1,250 to 2,500 million transactions created each month.  Now consider that if you keep 12 months worth of transactions per year in your current customer data collection the average of at least the last fiscal years’ transactions could total between 30 to 60 trillion records.  The program to calculate month-end statements will be doing a lot of reading. It will focus on the current month’s data, which is 1/12th of 30-60 trillion records. But, more importantly, it will be doing extremely critical writes in an extremely short period of time.

Symmetry Implies Quality
Read/write symmetry is important to look at when considering flash storage beyond just making sure applications can perform write operations quickly. As previously discussed, flash array vendors use a block translation layer (BTL) to manipulate and improve the write performance of flash. This BTL does much more than increase the speed at which flash writes. But if an array has read numbers that far exceed the write numbers and one sees a dramatic degradation in write performance with that array, then you can safely infer that storage solution software layer is carrying the write asymmetry back out to the operating system of the host application and the application itself.  This ratio of write to read performance should be looked at closely when evaluating an SSD array regardless of the IO Profile of an individual application.

Write performance isn’t only important to applications, it’s essential to the entire business. Applications cannot read anything that hasn’t first been written and they can only go as fast as their slowest write, which means the entire business may be at the mercy of its storage as it waits on writes.

The post Why Read/Write Symmetry Matters for Your Business appeared first on WHIPTAIL.

Following this webinar a subset of attendees will be able to put a WHIPTAIL array through its paces in their own test environment. We are confident you won’t be disappointed. In addition, one attendee will be able to take advantage of a free application health check, carried out by an independent 3rd party, to understand if storage performance is holding your business back.

The post Webinar: Financial Services – Take Control of Legacy Storage Performance and Costs appeared first on WHIPTAIL.

WHIPTAIL: What compelled you to want to research and compare the TCO of HDD and Flash?
Gary MacFadden: I like a challenge. I have worked with and seen a number of storage total cost of ownership (TCO) models over the years. But none of the models I’ve looked at made head-to-head comparisons between all-hard disk drive (HDD) and all-Flash arrays when implementing and sustaining performance-centric, enterprise-grade data storage assets. Most storage TCO models focus on capacity or IOPS, both of which are insufficient measurements for arriving at a true total cost of ownership for performance-centric data storage. To project a realistic TCO one would have to include environmental, labor, maintenance and storage management software costs.

Other performance-centric storage TCO models I’ve seen include server core reduction and lower costs for non-storage-related software licenses while leaving out labor or storage administration costs. To me, fewer servers or database licenses is one of the many return on investment (ROI) benefits of Flash, which could also include faster response time, improved employee or user satisfaction, shrinking backup windows or the ability to support new business initiatives. The ROI for implementing Flash arrays is enormous, but it doesn’t tell the CFO or the IT department how much to budget for storage only. A pure storage TCO model does that.

WT: How are you qualified to conduct this type of research?
GM: I’ve been part of the IT research and advisory industry for more than twenty years. I was introduced to TCO modeling about 15 years ago and over the years have worked with major corporations to help them negotiate multi-million dollar storage and server purchases. Interestingly, before I joined META Group in 1990, which was bought by Gartner in 2005, I sold route accounting and inventory management software for handheld computers that were among the first applications for solid state disk (SSD). Almost 25 years later, it’s amazing how far the technology has advanced.

WT: What did you expect to find? 
GM: When discussing the scope of this project with Max (Maxwell Riggsbee, WHIPTAIL CMO), he convinced me that a storage TCO model focused on performance would also demonstrate how Flash was more cost effective than traditional HDD. Frankly, I figured that even if the costs were equal that would be a compelling story – especially because of all the potential downstream benefits, including faster processing, lower energy costs and a smaller data center footprint.

WT: How did your expectations compare to the results? 
GM: I was very surprised. You might say shocked. When I created the formulas that sit behind the TCO model, I gave every advantage possible to HDD so as not to be biased toward Flash. For instance, the model assumes each individual Flash drive and HDD consume the same amount of power even though HDDs are known to consume more. The model also assumes that drive failure rates, ongoing maintenance, training and provisioning costs are equal. I included the highest performing HDD, measured in IOPS, with the deepest discounted prices I could find.

Over five years, a mid-side WHIPTAIL performance array is almost half the price of a comparably powered HDD array. The big savings for Flash customers are in power and cooling, data center rack space, and deployment and ongoing administrative costs. Simply put, all-Flash arrays are easier to deploy than Tiered HDD solutions or hybrid solutions that use a combination of Flash and HDD. Reduce complexity and you lower cost.

WT: Why do you think people are hesitant to believe Flash storage is more cost effective for performance purposes? 
GM: I think that hesitancy is grounded in the fact that many organizations still rely on traditional TCO models that use storage capacity and IOPS as the primary measurement when calculating costs for performance storage. It could also be that some organizations don’t consolidate or aggregate their costs the way our TCO model does. For instance, if the initial purchase price for data storage hits the IT budget but the ongoing facilities costs do not, then that organization will have a skewed view of overall storage costs. It’s as if you bought a car to commute 100 miles a week to your job and only factored in the purchase price of the automobile. You also need to account for gas, maintenance, license, insurance and perhaps even property taxes, tolls and parking costs.

WT: How do you think your findings affect the industry? 
GM: The word “disruptive” comes to mind. There is already enough anecdotal evidence that Flash is much less expensive – not to mention much faster – when performance is the primary goal. As a result, the market for enterprise-grade, performance HDD is collapsing. I believe Parity’s TCO work on performance-centric data storage is ground-breaking because it explicitly spells out all of the true storage TCO components and the model is simple enough that any application owner, purchasing or finance person can understand and easily adopt it for their own use.

The post Gary MacFadden Discusses His Data Storage TCO Research appeared first on WHIPTAIL.

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Rethink your storage strategy and prevent VDI nightmares from affecting your users’ experience while you save yourself from constantly fine-tuning your infrastructure. What if you could run as many anti-virus scans as needed throughout the day? What if your storage array could handle a boot storm of 600 desktops while concurrently managing constant database queries and an anti-virus scan, all without lag time or the dreaded spinning pinwheel? This webinar covers VDI nightmares, how to prevent them and what these changes mean for storage administrators in their day-to-day functions.

If you would like to learn more about the calculator referenced in this webinar, please contact us to set up a one-on-one conversation to review our VDI Calculator.

The post How to Prevent VDI Nightmares appeared first on WHIPTAIL.

Rethink your storage strategy and prevent VDI nightmares from affecting your users’ experience while you save yourself from constantly fine-tuning your infrastructure. What if you could run as many anti-virus scans as needed throughout the day? What if your storage array could handle a boot storm of 600 desktops while concurrently managing constant database queries and an anti-virus scan, all without lag time or the dreaded spinning pinwheel?

Join us for a webinar covering VDI nightmares and how to prevent them. We will also address what these changes mean for the storage administrator in their day-to-day function.

Register here.

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Darren Williams, WHIPTAIL SE Director of EMEA and APAC, will be speaking at the show on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Storage and High Performance – Making it Possible
23rd April 2013 at 11:30AM
Darren will explain why traditional storage is not good for performance, how NAND flash should be managed and how WHIPTAIL has eliminated the weakness from NAND in terms of endurance, write speed and affordability with its operating system.

Batch Processing – Why it’s Traditionally Done at Night and Why it Takes So Long
24th April 2013 at 3PM
Darren looks at how users supported by traditional storage have to run batch jobs overnight in order to have them finish before the start of the business day. This process means information can be out of date by the time users can access it. Darren will let attendees know the ramifications of this practice and that there is another way.

The post The Big Data Show 2013 appeared first on WHIPTAIL.

While working as the Director of Infrastructure at a financial institution we had an end-of-day report that was taking longer and longer to run as the business was picking up.  The amount of data read by the report was growing and the calculations needed to generate interest rate sensitivity curves were completing into the next business day.  At some point we either had to shorten the report production step or choose not to take on any new business. We took the process, which had been running on a single production cluster, and distributed it across multiple server clusters and partitioned the data to mitigate the read and write latencies that were extending the report process. It was a less than ideal workaround needed because of the disk storage’s slow performance, but it allowed us to continue growing.

Disk vs. Time
There are time penalties associated with both hard disk and flash storage. When writing, HDDs spend some of this time just making sure the drive’s head is in the right position on the track and the platter has spun to the correct location. These are referred to as rotational and seek latency and it potentially adds six milliseconds of time.

As a workaround, database administrators have employed many techniques such as over-provisioning, the act of buying more storage than is needed; short stroking, only storing data on a small portion of the disk; and caching, writing temporarily to a non-persistent memory before backing up to persistent storage. While these techniques do bring minimal time savings, they are all very costly to a business and waste investments.

Of these techniques the most commonly used is to execute as much IO in non-persistent memory as possible.  This type of memory typically can perform IOs in a millionth of the time needed to write to hard drives.  While the speed will allow your applications to feel as if they’re running faster, at some point you have to make the data persist.

Flash vs. Time
This leads us to NAND flash, which is organized into blocks that are then divided into pages—eliminating rotational and seek latency. Flash media executes reads and writes a thousand times faster than rotational storage. However, this speed boost is not enough and unless the IO to flash media is manipulated, flash writes data much slower than it reads.

For example, if I were to buy a thumb drive from a computer supply store and plug it into my laptop, the writes to flash used in that drive are managed solely by the on-board controller and my write activity is going to be slower than my read activity. Why is this? An extra step is required when writing to flash; it must erase the block it is going to write to before it can write the data.  If you are writing less than a block, it reads the existing data, erases the data and then writes the merged data back.

Enterprise flash storage vendors have developed techniques to mitigate the problem of slow writes by adding a block translation layer (BTL). Each vendor’s BTL operates differently and finds varying results based on what techniques are used, but one of the goals is to equalize read and write performance.

As a part of BTL, a storage array will perform a function called “garbage collection.” This process uses a “lazy erase” to erase all of the flash memory pages that the array has read data from before writing it somewhere else so that the erase did not have to be executed at the time of the write. The process eliminates the extra step and increases the array’s write performance.

To fit appropriately in the data center, flash must be manipulated. And to find optimal storage performance, businesses must compare the read and write ratio offered by flash arrays. In my next blog I’ll explain why this read/write symmetry is so important.

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• One to Watch Award Product
• One to Watch Award Company
• Flash/SSD Product of the Year

Traditionally, the readers of Storage Magazine reward outstanding products, services and people in the IT industry. The 2012 Awards experienced a new record of 8.500 readers who voted for their favorite products, people and companies and that number is expected to grow. Vote for WHIPTAIL at the Storries’s website.

The post The Storries Nomination appeared first on WHIPTAIL.

UPDATE: Want to learn more about MacFadden’s findings and ask him questions about his research? Attend the Calculating the True TCO for Performance Storage webinar.

 To embed this infographic on your site:
<a href=”http://whiptail.com/blog/infographic-what-is-the-tco-for-performance-storage/”><img src=”http://whiptail.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/What-is-the-TCO-for-Performance-Storage.jpg” alt=”What is the TCO for Performance Storage – Infographic” title=”What is the TCO for Performance Storage – Infographic” width=”825″ height=”4344″ /></a><br/><a href=”http://whiptail.com”>WHIPTAIL – Performance Storage</a>

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We encourage you to make your voices heard and vote for WHIPTAIL! We are in the SSD Flash Product of the Year category (found under Technology Awards) here.

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Hard Disk Drive Storage & Read/Write Symmetry
With spinning magnetic media, data is written to or read from an addressable location on that drive, which is either a sector or a portion of a sector residing in a track that sits on a disk. In order to perform either action, the heads are moved to the proper location on the disk and the data is written or read respectively. Because either action takes the same amount of time, hard disk drives always offer symmetric reads and writes, but they also experience rotational and seek latency.

Memory Storage & Read/Write Symmetry
Memory can be broken down into two classes: persistent and non-persistent. With non-persistent memory, a block of data is written at a specified address to a value and data is read from that same block of bytes. Similar to HDDs, non-persistent memory has symmetric read/write behavior. If non-persistent memory storage loses power the bytes of data are lost and cannot be recovered or accessed again.

Persistent memory, the predominant version of which is NAND flash, is asymmetrical. It reads data in blocks. Its write activity is a system of adding redundant (parity) data to a block such that it can be recovered. This occurs in four steps. It reads the existing data in the block, merges it with the new data, erases the original data and then writes the new data to the block. These are specific and unique operations not present in HDDs or non-persistent memory. Because of this, the write operation takes much longer to perform than the read operation and read/write symmetry can only be achieved when the flash write is manipulated.

Achieving read/write symmetry should be a priority for your business. However, this does not mean HDD storage or non-persistent memory is always the right option. The pros and cons of each solution must be weighed while also evaluating how a storage vendor has manipulated its flash arrays and what read/write numbers it is then able to attain. I’ll be discussing this topic more in upcoming posts.

The post Read/ Write Symmetry: What is it and What Storage Options Have It appeared first on WHIPTAIL.

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In order to mine and analyze data by performing multi-variant hypothesis testing on complex systems or by performing predictive modeling for market perceptions, the IT challenge is to find the best solution for reaching an ever expanding user base with a corresponding demand for timely, high-performance access to targeted data.

Imagine the positive effect if systems could process analytic intelligence and generate reports for extracting and integrating data 10 times faster. WHIPTAIL’s 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.

inVentiv Health implemented a faster virtual environment with WHIPTAIL. “After deploying WHIPTAIL’s silicon storage solution we have found our virtual environment is running 4X faster and the help desk calls have stopped completely,” stated Tony Marando, Manager of Technical. “Those reports that took hours now only take minutes… The 10X increase in improved performance offers us a distinct competitive advantage. WHIPTAIL’s underlying Flash-based architecture shows tremendous performance. We were able to stop over-provisioning in spindles (while wasting capacity) to try to optimize the underlying storage.”

The post Analytics & Intelligence appeared first on WHIPTAIL.

• Increasing demand for data velocity
• Righting the IO imbalance
• Accelerating Workloads
• The WHIPTAIL Product Family
• Customer Stories
• Q&A Session

Tweet about and during the webinar using #PropelBusiness

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James Candelaria, CTO
SaaS, PaaS and IaaS are really interesting and extremely powerful ideas that, for very different reasons, are beginning to take hold in both small-medium and large enterprises.

The small and medium businesses out there tend to have fewer resources to dedicate specifically to specializations, which allows them to offload some of their requirements to the Cloud or to experts more capable of handling those solutions. For the enterprise it’s more about scale—providing burst capability for workloads that may not be able to work efficiently inside of their own data centers.

Flash is an important driver in use cases both small and large.  Small businesses leverage larger providers such as Amazon, who has introduced new high IO capabilities that utilize unmanaged flash to present a best effort SLA. The larger organizations using SaaS, PaaS or IaaS will also need to leverage flash, but will want to take a more strategic approach.  This will require a more robust managed flash infrastructure that can dynamically grow or shrink the performance envelope as necessary to meet the business goals/SLAs while not falling victim to the “noisy neighbor” issue.  For the providers, a truly scalable, managed flash platform is required to make this objective a reality.

Maxwell Riggsbee, VP of Product Management and CMO
The appeal of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS is speed of deployment. Companies move to IaaS because the infrastructure is ready to use.  One can immediately take an application, put it onto the platform and get going. The same is true for SaaS. One does not have to build a CRM system; they can simply start using a preexisting one such as SalesForce.com.

This movement is fueled by companies that face slow application deployments due to hard disk drive technology, which requires a lot of configuring and maintenance. Flash starts to change that. I believe a number of applications that have moved to IaaS will move back to in-house IT as flash enables a simpler and faster way to deploy applications and eliminates the need to configure hard disk drive technology.

Accelerating applications is the most important thing for IaaS and SaaS customers. Expect to see as-a-service providers adopting flash to fuel performance.

Ryan Snell, VP and General Manager of the Americas
Most businesses of all sizes already take advantage of SaaS today (Salesforce.com, Concur, Office365, etc.).  This trend should continue, as not only is the risk lower than ever, but there is a dramatic increase in competition driving down costs.

Regarding PaaS and IaaS, it’s hard to see short-term adoption grow past large enterprise development departments and large enterprises with strategic platform projects that see unanticipated surges in infrastructure requirements.  Ultimately, security will remain the number one obstacle while complexity and cost will follow thereafter.

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WHIPTAIL’s INVICTA is a next-generation NAND flash storage array that provides highly scalable IOPS, total system throughput, and ultra-low latency at groundbreaking price for performance, while ACCELA offers an unsurpassed high-performance solid-state data storage solution.

Installed worldwide in numerous mission-critical database, virtualisation, 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.

First Distribution has strong representation by its vendors in the storage arena, having well-set and established vendor relationships with IBM, EMC, Oracle, Huawei, and Iomega. The latest agreement with WHIPTAIL adds further strength and depth to the company’s already impressive storage portfolio.

Having taken note of the rapidly-emerging industry trend towards big data, and the accompanying storage needs, First Distribution has shored up its storage division accordingly. Solid-state drives are a highly promising emerging technology, and integrate well with First Distribution’s reputation for distributing innovative and industry-leading products and solutions.

Ludwig Dedekind, General Manager of First Distribution, commented that “flash storage is everywhere these days, and while it’s common in mobile devices, it’s now also gaining traction within the traditional storage sphere of high-performance desktop computers, servers, and enterprise-scale storage systems. I think we’re going to start seeing it becoming increasingly attractive for businesses to switch to flash memory, as it does not have the mechanical limitations of hard drives – as well as being faster and less noisy and consuming less power. Flash storage technology is also continuing to improve in maturity, cost, and reliability. One of the features which I really admire about WHIPTAIL is its use of innovative data acceleration software to bring enterprise-level I/O speeds to users without any of the hardware degradation that these speeds usually entail.”

Ludwig added that “WHIPTAIL’s flash-based NAND silicon storage is exactly the kind of leading technology which First Distribution prides itself on distributing. We’re very pleased to have signed the agreement with them, and look forward to working together with them in the future.”

Brian Feller, VP and General Manager of WHIPTAIL EMEA, sees uptake of Flash-based storage in enterprise environments on the rise: “IT managers are realising that traditional spinning disks are no longer able to deliver the quality of end-user experience expected when it’s ‘business as usual’ at stake. Big data applications and continuing pressure to make rapid decisions mean companies are struggling to move data fast enough. There is strong demand for technology to increase performance in these areas.

“Organisations are increasingly turning to flash storage to provide the resilience required in performance-intensive, mission-critical environments. Flash has historically been perceived as prohibitively expensive, with short lifecycles and lower write capacities than traditonal storage – but we are shattering those myths and providing First Distribution’s customers with the ability to dramatically cut their storage total cost of ownership while moving data faster than ever,” he concluded.

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March 26, 2013 – Hedensted Kommune has selected WHIPTAIL’s performance storage technology to power 800 virtual desktops, including mobile devices, across the local authority’s network over the next year. Hedensted Kommune has migrated 400 desktops to WHIPTAIL’s storage array, and has saved approximately 1.5 million kr (approx. $225k) in immediate storage costs.

With an objective to increase staff productivity as well as provide an improved service to citizens, Hedensted Kommune’s front line workforce is increasingly mobile. Employees require access to both its SAP business management solution as well as the business critical data held within it, at any time, including from tablets and smartphones. Hedensted Kommune researched the benefits of a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to enable mobile workers to run the data-hungry application.

“I was very focused on the performance problems caused by running VDI on hard disk drives,” commented Kim Bengtsson, Networks and Server Administrator at Hedensted Kommune. “The field employees cannot afford to wait on data reaching their devices; we need to maintain a quality service and high levels of productivity. Running VDI on hard drives or an SAN would make the project unfeasible on a cost and performance level, but WHIPTAIL’s storage array would deliver the performance that we required.”

Bengtsson was first introduced to WHIPTAIL at Citrix Synergy in Barcelona, through distributor Commaxx. He said: “WHIPTAIL was the missing link I was looking for – I was concerned about the initial cost of silicon storage technology but they showed us how to run VDI the way it should be, and at a very cost effective price point.”

Hedensted Kommune has migrated from a hard-drive based storage area network (SAN) to Citrix XenDesktop, supported by a 6TB WHIPTAIL storage array installed as the authority’s local server. According to Bengtsson: “Pre-rollout stress tests on the WHIPTAIL array have reached an impressive 250k input/outputs a second. During migration I have not yet been anywhere near pushing the box to its limits. This is no doubt the best piece of hardware I have ever had out of the box; anybody can configure it within 25 minutes – and that includes a coffee break.”

The local authority has already saved 1.5m kr by choosing to deploy its 800 virtual desktops on WHIPTAIL’s silicon storage array, rather than a hard-drive based SAN.

These incredible savings are sustainable, as Brian Feller, VP and General Manager EMEA at WHIPTAIL added: “With public sector budgets continually under the microscope, organisations are under pressure to find efficiencies where possible. Hedensted Kommune can expect to save money every time an employee access SAP from their mobile device, as data is sent and received in lightning speed. VDI demands high input/outputs for it to work effectively, plus Hedensted Kommune can expect to easily scale up as it grows the workforce.”

Bengtsson said: “Our next project will be to run VDI with personal Vdisk for our graphics-demanding users – as we are confident that WHIPTAIL’s technology will be able to deliver the required IOPS and low latency for this scenario as well.”

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“I love WHIPTAIL, it’s so freaking fast and it never goes down.”

These were the first words that greeted me when I sat down with Fred Schimscheimer, designer of the RAWC (Desktop Reference Architecture Workload Code) and senior technical marketing manager at VMware’s Palo Alto HQ. Fred’s had a WHIPTAIL for nearly a year now and is one of our most stalwart supporters on their product marketing team. While my visit helped me recap with Fred, its main purpose was to explore an upcoming joint project between WHIPTAIL and VMware.

A large part of my role in WHIPTAIL’s Business Development team is working with Independent Software Vendors (ISV’s) to understand their applications and how we can closely work together to create a solution that provides great benefits to our mutual customers. This could be as simple as making their back end database faster or as complex as co-operatively coding with them to offload some of the application’s storage requirements direct to the WHIPTAIL box. VMware’s VAAI is a perfect example of this.

For ISVs, the mean time to market with the latest version of their application is key, but always has to be tempered by releasing a robust and bug-free product.   This is achieved by multiple parallel tests, Quality Assurance (QA) test runs, simulated user tests and internal code releases…. And all of this is before we even get to the Alpha and Beta test phases! The process is resource intensive and time-consuming as well as frenetic as the company races to release the latest features into a crowded marketplace. Being the first to market with a long sought-after feature gives a massive competitive advantage for the organisation that manages it.

Fred created the RAWC tool in order to generate a realistic, adjustable user workload simulation for VDI projects, the results of which can be analysed to identify the appropriate environment for a VDI project. The RAWC workload runs on a Windows 7 or Windows XP operating system and opens applications such as Word, Outlook and Adobe Reader and even initiates a Virus Scan at random to mimic the actions of a desktop user.

Fred ran me through his latest project and whilst I can’t divulge the exact nature of the tests, I can tell you that it is a competitive comparison between two VDI-based products and it is sufficient to note that 1/100^th of a second is an important degree of measurement and accuracy is key, especially as the test scales outwards to several thousand users. When I probed a little further about why Fred chose WHIPTAIL for his current project he replied, “Transparency in your testing is vital and you want it so that your storage isn’t leaving you wondering whether it’s impacting your results or not. WHIPTAIL was the only storage I trusted to give me that.”

VMware isn’t the only ISV whose testing has been impacted by its storage. Both large multi-discipline organisations and dedicated ISVs have found dramatic improvements when moving their storage to flash. I am always interested in hearing from ISVs regarding what they’re working on and performance issues they may be facing. Find me on Twitter, LinkedIn or share your thoughts in the comments below.

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What would happen if a critical batch job, especially one that interfaces with other critical functions, does not complete within its window? Is there a danger of breaching a Service Level Agreement that can result in significant financial loss or a compromised reputation in the industry?

High-volume batch processing puts heavy demands on systems. WHIPTAIL products add write and read performance and scalability to enable batch processing without pausing workflow.

One WHIPTAIL logistics customer in the freight transportation industry was experiencing major operational inefficiencies–although they depended on round-the-clock collection of customer messages, they needed to shut down their messaging system for six hours each night to run batches. When the batches completed, the start of regular workday activities was significantly delayed until the backlog of overnight messages could be received, filtered and addressed. With WHIPTAIL, batch processing was reduced to two hours and no longer requires shutting down the customer messaging system.

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For most companies, as more workloads demand more performance they respond by purchasing more mechanical hard disk storage. The result? Marginally better workload acceleration that drives IT effort whilst consuming more energy and more floor space. Mechanical hard disk drives constrain workloads and business agility.

Matt Goldensohn, Director of Business Solutions, presents another option. Rethinking the storage decision allows accelerating workloads to drive business effectiveness rather than IT effort. He reviews real world examples of multi-workload testing with solid-state arrays and the resulting metrics.

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For most companies, as more workloads demand more performance they respond by purchasing more mechanical hard disk storage. The result? Marginally better workload acceleration that drives IT effort whilst consuming more energy and more floor space. Mechanical hard disk drives constrain workloads and business agility.

Join Matt Goldensohn, Director of Business Solutions for WHIPTAIL, as he presents another option. Rethinking the storage decision allows accelerating workloads to drive business effectiveness rather than IT effort. He will discuss real world examples of multi-workload testing with solid-state arrays and the resulting metrics, as well as answer your questions about multi-tenancy on flash storage.

Register here.

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Join us for a webinar covering best practices for deploying VDI on flash storage. Discover how WHIPTAIL’s ACCELA and INVICTA storage arrays provide the optimal platform for running virtual desktops and allow businesses to deploy thousands of desktops within a single 2U shelf of storage.

Register here.

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What if…

• Storage performance limitations were the furthest thing from your mind?
• VDI environment could scale to thousands of users without any performance concerns?
• Separate reporting and processing silos could be eliminated because the impact on production was no longer an issue?
• Virtual tier 1 workloads could out accelerate traditional physical workloads?
• Most importantly; what if this was at a cost already in line with today’s expectations?

Simply put, it’s an enormous shift in thinking and it’s a critical shift in storage design for virtual infrastructures. Attend this event and learn how WHIPTAIL helps its customers achieve incredible results by employing our flash storage solutions. Register here.

Attendees will be entered to win a $100 gift certificate.

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Tweet about and during the webinar using #WHIPTAILin20.

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Tweet about and during the summit using #BigDataFast.

Register here.

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Whippany, N.J. – March 12, 2013 – WHIPTAIL, the data storage industry innovator powering faster and more energy-efficient computing for today’s global businesses via flash storage, announced today that Cristóbal Conde has been named chairman of its board of directors.

“Having Cris on our board has been a boon for our young company, and as we mature, having him as chairman will continue to pay dividends for WHIPTAIL,” said CEO Dan Crain. “His experience and advice has been invaluable to our continued growth.”

Conde is a senior advisor with TPG Capital and Providence Equity Partners, serves on the boards of Digital Reasoning Systems and MassMutual Financial Group and is a trustee for the College of Mount Saint Vincent. He comes from a background in data centers and is considered a pioneer in guiding financial and energy companies to solutions for complex business problems from his days as president and CEO of SunGard.

“From power to performance to footprint, the modern data center is feeling more pressure than ever,” said Conde. “That pressure is accelerating the usage of memory-based storage and WHIPTAIL’s all-flash arrays are designed from the ground up to eliminate all three pain points. It’s an elegant solution to a growing problem.”

In addition to Conde, WHIPTAIL’s board of directors includes Richard Fade of Ignition Partners, Avi Falks and Raymond Wong from Spring Mountain Capital and Will Porteous from RRE Ventures.

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Watch this archived webinar to examine the trends affecting the need for application speed and how each company’s storage decision will either constrain or unleash its most critical workloads.

Hosted By:
Max Riggsbee
VP of Product Management and CMO, WHIPTAIL
@mkriggsbee

Tim Stammers
Senior Analyst, 451 Research
@carryonpompei

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Join us for a webinar that examines the trends affecting the need for application speed and how each company’s storage decision will either constrain or unleash its most critical workloads. Register here.

Hosted By:
Max Riggsbee
VP of Product Management and CMO, WHIPTAIL

Tim Stammers
Senior Analyst, 451 Research

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Some definitions to help clarify:

Raid configurations will not affect the number of read IOPs per user, but can greatly affect the number of write IOPs per user. A Raid 1 Mirrored configuration requires two physical writes for every user write IOP and is most commonly used by HDD vendors to obtain optimal performance at a capacity cost. Raid 5 requires 4 IOPs (read old parity, read old data, write new data, write new parity) for each user write IOP, gaining capacity at the cost of performance. To achieve acceptable performance using Raid 5 requires using SSD arrays.

For VDI configurations not doing fully dedicated persistent VMs, conventional best practices have read and write IOPs separated to allow for optimal performance. Read performance and the user experience will be affected if reads and writes go to the same storage.

Both Citrix XenDesktop and VMware View offer best practices on separating reads and writes. Citrix XenDesktop utilizes PVS (Provisioning Server) to manage the master image on a separate server. Reads go to the provisioning server and, if configured to Citrix best practices, writes will go to the storage utilizing write cache files for each VM. VMware View allows for placement of the replicas on a different location than the storage containing the associated linked clones. The Replica is placed on high performing/low capacity storage like SSDs to provide optimal read performance. The writes are to the linked clones on higher capacity storage. With read and write IOPs separated the read/write ratio becomes important.

If a user is doing 40 IOPs, but the reads come from one location and the writes go to a different storage location, we need to break down the IOPs. As an example, assume a user is 40/60 read/write (r/w) ratio. This means 40% (16) of the IOPs are read, and 60% (24) are writes. So, using the Citrix model we can know the reads are coming from the provisioning server and the only writes are going to our storage. But what about user data? A best practice for VDI has the user data storage on a different storage location like a share and not within the VM. As a rule of thumb, user data IOPs are a very small percentage of IO and are often in peaks such as the opening of a file. Until the file is saved or closed nothing is written back to the user data storage, however temporary data is written every few seconds to the write cache/differential files, which is on the storage we are concerned about. To account for user data IO, a rule of thumb is to specify 1 IOP each for read/write of user data, so in our 40 IOPs user example accounting for user data the numbers become 15 read IOPs and 23 write IOPs allowing 1 read and 1 write IOP for user data.

In our example, the 15 read IOPs would come from the provisioning server and the 23 write IOPs would go to our storage. However, testing has shown that in a Citrix XenDesktop configuration using a PVS provisioning server and write cache files, the r/w ratio to the storage is actually 10/90. There are some reads that come from the temp files on the storage. A rule of thumb here is to allow 1 read for every 10 writes, always rounding up.

To determine the IOPs to our storage:
Storage IOPs = Write IOPs + Read IOPs
Storage Write IOPs = ((Total IOPs * write %) – 1) * Raid Penalty
Storage Read IOPs = (Total IOPs * write %) / 10 rounded up

For example, our 40 IOP user has a 40/60 r/w ratio, and we will assume a Raid 1 mirror. The calculation would be:
Storage Write IOPs = ((40 *.6) – 1) * 2 = (24 – 1) * 2 = 23 * 2 = 46
Storage Read IOPs = (40 * .6) / 10 = 24 / 10 = 3 rounded up
Total Storage IOPs = 46 + 3 = 49

To support 1000 users would require 49000 IOPs from the storage if using Citrix XenDesktop and provisioning server handling the read IOPs.

If doing VMware View and following the best practice of placing the Replica(s) on a different location then the calculations are the same as with Citrix XenDesktop.

However, if the replicas are on the same storage as the linked clones, then View will perform very similar to a fully dedicated persistent VDI session. For these scenarios the Storage IOPs would be determined by:
Storage Write IOPs = ((Total IOPs * write %) – 1) * Raid penalty
Storage Read IOPs = (Total IOPs * read %) – 1

As an example, a user doing 40 IOPs with a 40/60 r/w ratio moved to a fully dedicated persistent VDI session using Raid 1:
Total IOPs = 40
Storage Write IOPs = ((40 *.6)-1) * 2 = (24-1) * 2 = 23 * 2 = 46
Storage Read IOPs = (40 * .4) – 1 = 16 – 1 = 15
Total Storage IOPs = 46 + 15 = 61

These formulas are rules of thumb and are designed to help estimate IOP requirements. To fully understand IOP requirements it is recommended an assessment of your users be done.

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Find WHIPTAIL at booth #1103 between 8 AM and 6 PM.

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But according to Storage-Switzerland.com, WHIPTAIL’s modular all-flash arrays bring a cost effective way to deal with rapidly increasing IOPS needs and introduce a high-performance, scalable solution into the data center. Read Colm Keegan’s Briefing Note to learn more.

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Rapidly Expanding Customer Base Leads to Outsourced Manufacturing with Leading Provider of Purpose-Built Application Platforms, Appliances

WHIPPANY, N.J. – Feb. 21, 2012 – WHIPTAIL the data storage industry innovator powering faster and more energy-efficient computing for today’s global businesses via its innovative flash storage arrays, has partnered with global manufacturer NEI to meet demand for WHIPTAIL’s family of products.

NEI provides application platforms, deployment solutions and lifecycle support services for software technology developers and OEMs worldwide. It is known for its expertise in storage, security and communications. WHIPTAIL chose NEI as its manufacturing partner because the company has extensive experience in solution design, manufacture, global logistics and lifecycle management. By leveraging NEI’s qualified procedures and process, WHIPTAIL has been able to speed time to market for its storage arrays while minimizing the effort and resources that WHIPTAIL would otherwise expend, enabling it to concentrate on its core business.

“We’ve been shipping product for a little more than two years now, and have broken the 200 customer threshold,” said WHIPTAIL CEO Dan Crain. “When we were a small company, we could handle our own manufacturing, but that’s not the case anymore. NEI has a commitment to quality workmanship and very efficient business operations. They take pride in delivering and supporting a high-quality, reliable product, and that’s what our customers expect.”

For NEI, adding WHIPTAIL is another validation of its LEAD (Lifecycle Engine for Application Deployment) System, which includes all steps from design, integration, management, logistics and more. NEI’s LEAD model is perfectly suited to help software developers like WHIPTAIL deliver and support powerful, affordable appliance solutions to meet their schedules and competitive performance criteria.

“We have a unique skill set in this industry that enables young companies to economically and efficiently bring their products to market and compete with established players on a level playing field,” said Jeff Hudgins, VP of marketing at NEI. “Our customers range from startups to Fortune 500 enterprises, and each benefits from our engineering expertise and manufacturing capabilities to solve the numerous challenges involved in getting an application to market.”

NEI manufactures WHIPTAIL’s full range of all-flash storage arrays, including the ACCELA and the hyperscale INVICTA for customers worldwide.

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With WHIPTAIL, business-critical applications will benefit from exceptional performance, whether data access is random or sequential and whether IO sensitivity is upon read or write. Our silicon storage array performance metrics are orders of magnitude (100x) above spinning disks to significantly improve database load performance. Varied connectivity options ensure that our high performance storage is correctly plugged in to the overall solution.

WHIPTAIL’s storage offerings are designed and built to efficiently handle the high IO profile demand of critical database applications at a fraction of the cost of mainstream storage vendors.

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Flash storage continues to gain buzz in the channel community. Channel consultant Bruce Hockin described, “Over the next three years the enterprise market will witness a seismic shift as flash technology matures from a tier 0/1, optimisation play to a bulk storage alternative.” Read No Room at the Inn? and learn about the distinct advantage WHIPTAIL can offer VADs.

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To embed this infographic on your site:
<a href=”http://whiptail.com/blog/household-appliances-vs-flash-storage-wattage-reference-infographic/”><img src=”http://whiptail.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Household-Appliances-vs.-Flash-Storage-Wattage-Reference.png” alt=”Household Appliances vs. Flash Storage Wattage Reference – Infographic” title=”Household Appliances vs. Flash Storage Wattage Reference – Infographic” width=”825″ height=”1954″ /></a><br/><a href=”http://whiptail.com”>WHIPTAIL – Performance Storage</a>

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Achieving Speed and Endurance Out of SSD
Darren Williams, SE Director EMEA & APAC, will be speaking on January 29 at 18:15. He’ll look at the difference between SLC flash and MLC flash and how WHIPTAIL’s unique RACERUNNER software can overcome some of the traditional limitations associated with flash, whilst accentuating the advantages to turn SSD storage into a valuable storage asset for your environment.

An Apple TV will be given away after the presentation to one attendee.

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I have a generator and was able to get most of the house back up and running without issue. With a one week old newborn and a two and a half year old toddler, the generator was a huge relief! I’ve used it a handful of times in the last few years and a couple of weeks ago I had some time to do preventive maintenance. There I was, paging through its manual looking up the maintenance schedules when I stumbled upon a Wattage Reference Guide. It listed the typical wattage draw of household appliances so you could plan for how many appliances could be run safely in the house using the generator. Then, those numbers put a few things into perspective for me with respect to our customers.

Now, I do power calculations for customers all the time. I have for years, for dozens of different environments placed in data centers. Everyone is concerned about the power draw of new components in relation to what the data center is capable of – and rightfully so, power is expensive and finite! But very seldom do I put those numbers in the context of my household appliances. I’ve never thought about how much my house draws versus the data center components I work with every day. That’s why this reference guide was so interesting, and here are a few examples:

The last three have asterisks because the guide mentions these types of appliances may draw up to three times the running wattage upon startup (it makes sense; think of the carousel at the playground when you were a kid – it’s easier to keep something spinning rather than to get it spinning). But that’s important, especially when you only have a finite amount of wattage to work with. In the case of my generator, it’s 5000 running watts, and up to 6500 peak watts. It’s critical that I decide how I use that power most efficiently for my house. Sure, I can get my TV, FiOS box and wireless router, microwave and a few other creature comforts up and running at the same time – but I may be giving up my furnace or the well pump for running water.

What’s that got to do with storage, WHIPTAI, or the price of eggs? Actually, quite a bit (okay, maybe the eggs are a stretch). Data centers do not have infinite power. In fact, these days it’s exactly the opposite. You can only get so much power to a building. Many customers talk to us about how they put a lot of effort into prioritizing those power needs. Now, if your applications suffer from performance shortcomings you need to put some horsepower behind them. The name of the game is IOPS or IO per second. In a traditional storage array, that horsepower will cost you some power draw – it takes power to spin those drives up and keep them spinning. Consider each traditional performance oriented 10k or 15k hard drive will draw on the order of about 10 watts, netting about 180 IOPS per drive. So, 250 drives will net you 45,000 IOPS and will cost you about 2500 watts. Add in a couple of array controllers likely drawing about 400 watts each. That gives us a pretty realistic scenario (and probably even generous) of 14 IOPS per watt.

Our INVICTA array delivers about 650,000 IOPS drawing 1960 watts (just a bit more than a coffee maker). That nets us 332 IOPS per watt – 23 times better than the performance-to-power ratio of traditional spinning disk. Our ACCELA array delivers 250,000 IOPS while drawing 180 watts (three standard light bulbs, based on my handy generator chart). That will net us 1389 IOPS per watt – 99 times what traditional storage is capable of.

Solid-state storage has already begun to radically change how we architect performance for applications in the data center. The data center will forever live within power constraints, just as your home generator will only be able to deliver so much. The question will always be how efficiently you can use that power.

Fortunately, the performance-to-power ratios we deliver make that choice very obvious and extremely compelling.

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Enter WHIPTAIL with 100% silicon storage arrays whose performance metrics are orders of magnitude (100x) above spinning disks to improve the e-mail user experience dramatically. Our varied connectivity options ensure that our high-performance storage is correctly plugged in to the overall e-mail solution. WHIPTAIL’s storage products are designed and built to efficiently handle the high IO profile demand of critical e-mail servers at a fraction of the cost and complexity of mainstream storage solutions.

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Kent Skovgaard will be presenting on Thursday at 11:05 and Friday at 12:25 on the Commaxx stand.

Learn more about the event.

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WHIPPANY, N.J. – Jan. 17, 2013 – WHIPTAIL, the data storage-industry innovator powering faster and more energy-efficient computing for today’s global businesses via flash storage, today announced significant corporate growth in 2012. WHIPTAIL’s 300 percent revenue growth is attributed to adding 130 new customers in 2012 and its strong presence in the government, healthcare, and education as well as the company’s continued expansion into new markets such as chemical manufacturing, medical research and news publishing.

“We believe that 2012 was the year that WHIPTAIL and Flash hit the tipping point,” said WHIPTAIL CEO Dan Crain. “The $31 million series C round highlighted by being SanDisk Ventures’ first strategic investment shows that confidence in our vision is strong. Combine that with our rapidly growing customer base and revenue and it’s obvious that Flash is not just the future of enterprise storage, it’s the now.”

Additional 2012 company highlights include:
• Products: Introduced ACCELA and INVICTA, the second generation WHIPTAIL all-Flash storage arrays. Announced INVICTA INFINITY, the industry’s highest capacity, highest performing and most flexible enterprise class modular solid state storage array on the market, capable of exceeding 4 million IOPS and 40GB/second throughput in real world use. Unveiled RACERUNNER 4.1.1, which adds the ability for a user to replicate their data to a non-WHIPTAIL target array for, increased flexibility, security and availability.
• Application Workload Growth: customers across 24 industries are operating faster on WHIPTAIL arrays. Customers moved databases, virtualized applications , search indexing, and virtual desktops to name a few onto WHIPTAIL. Leveraging INVICTA‘s modular scale-out ability, customers consolidated multiple applications onto a single array resulting in tremendous energy savings. WHIPTAIL arrays support more than 120,000 VDI end users across the globe.
• Company Expansion: Headcount has increased more than 500% in the past 12 months and as a result the company has expanded its headquarters in New Jersey and opened new offices in San Jose and London.
• Capacity: WHIPTAIL hit 3.7 petabytes and almost 60 million IOPS of all-Flash storage shipped worldwide. WHIPTAIL arrays have displaced more than 300,000 high-performance 300GB hard disk drives totaling 87 petabytes while saving WHIPTAIL users more than $10 million annually in combined energy and climate control costs.
• Partnerships: WHIPTAIL partnered with Cisco, Citrix, SanDisk, Micron and VMware in 2012. Each partnership is focused on delivering dramatically optimized ROI and enhanced user experiences for customers.

“Predictions for the demise of traditional rotational storage arrays and hard disk drives (HDD) are becoming more frequent as flash vendors continue to improve quality, capacity, and longevity,” said Gary MacFadden, founder of Parity Research. “Buyers looking to exploit solid state disk and accelerate application efficiency and dramatically improve user experience without breaking the bank should consider vendors such as WHIPTAIL. They have a proven solution to meet the needs of price-conscious customers who also desire a major performance boost.”

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We all know the beginning of the year is a great time to contemplate what’s ahead and learn about the new technologies that will drive the marketplace going forward. Of course, in this environment, that often means understanding how to do more with less – fewer resources, lower Capex and Opex whilst coping with greater demands for flexibility. This message resonates with consumers and we look forward to sharing it with customers and partners alike at Cisco LIVE.

Virtualisation has been key to Cisco since the introduction of the Unified Compute System back in 2009, Cisco’s fastest growing product in its history. UCS is a great example of disruptive innovation in a marketplace that had only seen incremental improvements for the previous two decades.

Bringing together networking, compute and memory in an innovative new approach, designed to deliver the optimal virtualised experience, has enabled Cisco to build an $800m+ run rate business in a little over 3 years. This new approach has, of course, benefited customers hugely as they have been able to deploy much more efficient IT systems that deliver more whilst lowering cost, using fewer racks and consuming less power.

Now that Cisco has offered a solution for network and compute, customers are looking for those same benefits in storage as the old spinning disk model has seen no real innovation since the 15k hard drive was brought to market two decades ago. There are many emerging players in the SSD world, which can prove to be confusing for customer and partners alike. As this market is experiencing hyper-growth and venture capitalists are responding by throwing cash at numerous start-ups to drive their marketing machines, it is often hard to see the wood from the trees.

WHIPTAIL has focused for 4 years on delivering the optimum performance environment for demanding applications. This is in stark contrast to traditional hard drive based storage, which is hugely inefficient and requires vast amounts of space and power to achieve mediocre performance. WHIPTAIL offers the potential to increase performance 100x, reduce power and space by 40x, at the same time delivering improved TCO.

In 2013, the key word for companies talking about NAND flash will be efficiency. Just like UCS, WHIPTAIL is not only helping customers and partners innovate around IT it is also helping them achieve the greatest efficiency in their investment of spend, power and space. This is our unique differentiator and enables us to deliver unprecedented value to customers and partners alike.

This is fundamentally why Cisco UCS and WHIPTAIL are such great bedfellows as they embrace the same spirit of disruptive innovation whilst delivering optimal performance for demanding applications. Applications from VDI to Databases thrive in this environment. Only last quarter a major Ministry of Defence in Western Europe chose to replace their HP IT stack with a combination of Cisco UCS and WHIPTAIL to deliver a best in class VDI environment for ~20,000 users.

If you are attending LIVE as an employee, customer or partner of Cisco I hope you will find the time to speak with us and discuss how working together we can ensure that we build the most efficient IT environments to run the most demanding IT applications in your data centre.

To learn more about WHIPTAIL’s solutions and how we engage in new ways to tackle the storage dilemma faced by so many Cisco clients, visit us at booth G10.

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To learn more about WHIPTAIL’s funding, read WHIPTAIL Raises $31 Million in Series C and Strategic Funding From Investors Including SanDisk.

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· Demonstrate technical innovation
· Offer solid value
· Provide practical functionality while performing well
· Integrate easily with existing data storage infrastructures
· Are notable for ease of use and manageability

Storage system finalists are in the vanguard of new technologies. The category includes, among others, Fibre Channel and iSCSI SANs, network-attached storage, multiprotocol systems, hard disk drives, solid-state storage, storage virtualization appliances and cloud storage gateway appliances.

Judges are Storage magazine and SearchStorage.com editors and storage industry experts as well as storage users.

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• Brief Overview of WHIPTAIL History
• WHIPTAIL Silicon Storage Arrays
• Use Cases for Performance Storage
• Business Solutions with WHIPTAIL
• Differentiators between WHIPTAIL and other SSD devices
• Q&A Session

Register for the webinar.

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Historically Speaking
In the early 2000s, many IT research pieces were published, including an influential report published by the US Department of Energy, suggesting data centers consumed more than 1% of global energy production. A handful of technology manufacturers used that information to drive sales by convincing customers they had a problem, even though the technology hadn’t changed. People running data centers for big companies were left rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. They were already out of power and in order to put anything new into existing data centers they had to first remove equipment that used the same amount of power.

There was a time when it seemed like every big technology vendor claimed they were going to reduce power consumption, improve ROI and improve TCO. The funny thing is, in the end, nobody did anything. Frankly, within the three major IT segments that consume power—networking, computing, storage—nobody actually cared other than the marketing departments who create stories about technology. Very few real power consumption improvements were made in these segments. Recent data from a variety of researchers claims that Data Centers now consume a bit over 2% of all power in the US alone, suggesting that power consumption has DOUBLED in the past decade.

Improvements. Sort of.
Influenced by the laptop industry, where consumers demanded longer battery life, AMD and Intel started to develop ways to decrease CPU energy consumption based on a variety of measurements. Power saving features started to trickle down into server CPUs and major server manufacturers began touting how much their new generation of servers reduced power consumption, but this was not entirely accurate. They were claiming wins for something they had little to do with as the power savings were predicated on what AMD and Intel had done to CPUs. And, unfortunately, these modest reductions were canceled out as the number of servers across the world skyrocketed.

The networking industry also had challenges with power reduction as there was a never ending appetite for wider connectivity, faster speeds and more reliability. But the networking infrastructure was less of an overall power consumer than servers or storage.

The Biggest Culprit
The storage segment is the biggest transgressor by a wide margin. With computing and networking segments, if servers or network switches sit idle they will consume somewhat less energy when they are not in use as they are load dependent. This is absolutely not the case with traditional storage.

Every hard disk has two motors in it—a spindle motor that spins the disk and a stepper motor that drives the read/write head. These motors run constantly. Commercial storage arrays with up to 2400 disks spinning simultaneously without a variable consumption of power go through extreme amounts of power, 24/7/365. In addition to the thousands of spinning disks are the other components that make the storage array work—CPUs, memory, networking components—all continuously devouring power.

Finally, Real Power Reduction Can Be Achieved.
The most effective way for data centers to reduce power consumption is with storage, but not of the spinning disk variety. Storage is the biggest energy consumer and spinning disks can’t solve the problem. If you build a large-scale storage array with 2,000 disks, each disk draws 11 watts of energy to power and 13.2 watts to cool¹. That’s a total of 48,400 watts or 48.4 kW—an astonishing number. And that’s just one storage array. Most companies have many, many storage arrays. And of those disks that are spinning, only a small amount of their capacity is actually devoted to real data.

On the other hand, flash drives use 2 watts to power and 2.4 watts to cool¹. If you want to compare apples to apples, 2,000 flash drives would consume a total of 8,800 watts or 8.8 kW. That’s an energy savings of 39.6 kW every hour of every day.

Until there are wholesale changes in the basic mix of commercial Information Technology deployments, power usage will continue to grow. In reality, converting at least part of a storage infrastructure from spinning disks to flash-based arrays is the only real way to cut energy costs and reduce consumption. It’s one of the few areas where there’s actually an alternative. And based on the numbers we’ve seen, the energy savings make a world of difference.

¹According to SNIA Solid State Storage Total Cost of Ownership Calculator, each 2.5” 15k disk consumes 11 watts of power and each 2.5” NAND Flash drive consumes 2 watts of power. Any device, regardless if it is a disk drive or flash drive, requires 1.2 watts of energy to cool for every single watt used to power the device.

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WHIPTAIL, the data storage industry innovator powering faster and more energy-efficient computing for today’s global businesses via flash storage, has helped two UK schools improve the hardware and application performance of their new virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI) using its ACCELA Flash storage arrays. The technology provides highly scalable Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS), ensuring that educational institutions such as Kenton and St. Wilfrid’s are equipped to handle the increased data transfer demands of virtualized environments.

Technology that can boost performance in these areas is in strong demand in educational institutions, where it is increasingly common for pupils to participate in lessons on individual laptops each owned by the school. This creates challenges for IT managers, as hardware and application performance suffers with widespread simultaneous activity – a problem compounded by the high IOPS demands of VDI, which is increasingly being rolled out in schools as an alternative to justifying the expense of upgrading or replacing outdated hardware.

Paul Kernohan, Network Manager at Kenton School in Newcastle upon Tyne, emphasized the need to balance high performance and quality of end-user experience with value for money: “With so many users performing IT tasks simultaneously, our storage needs to be able to handle massive peaks and troughs in IOPS. Our top priorities are speed and the ability to meet the IOPS demands of our new VMware view VDI. But we were conscious of the need to future-proof our infrastructure to justify spending public money. We looked at hybrid hard-disk/solid-state drives (HDD/SSD), but their IOPS performance was no improvement. Once we decided on SSD, WHIPTAIL was the only supplier we considered: no other product delivers such high performance, and the scalability of the ACCELA means we won’t need to rip it out when we convert more of our storage to SSD.”

At St Wilfrid’s Catholic High School and Sixth Form College in Wakefield, teachers complained to ICT Manager Chris Slater that they wasted up to 30 minutes per lesson waiting for the whole class to log on. Reluctant to commit to the recurring cost and inconvenience of replacing or upgrading classroom hardware, Slater deployed a VMware view VDI powered by a WHIPTAIL ACCELA array, and the benefits of Flash storage have been immediately obvious.

“We currently have 60 virtual machines, but we plan to increase this to 600. VDI also lets us keep 60 desktops that would otherwise be nearing the end of their life this academic year – and there will be plenty more in the future. The storage product we use needs to offer the right blend of speed, capacity, and scalability. When evaluating suppliers, we found that many sacrificed too much speed by providing broader functionality: we would be adding boxes every year, taking the long-term cost of ownership way beyond our budget. WHIPTAIL was the only logical choice. Class log-on time is down to only four minutes, and virtual PCs are much easier to support, as we can resolve issues remotely without disrupting students’ work. And we are saving time and money by not having to replace the old classroom hardware.”

Brian Feller, VP and General Manager of WHIPTAIL EMEA, predicts substantially increased uptake of SSD in the education sector: “As more institutions deploy VDI to reduce the traditionally high turnover and cost of hardware, they will increasingly rely on SSDs to provide the necessary resilience to highly demanding IOPS requirements. IT managers will soon realize that traditional HDDs are no longer equipped to deliver the quality of end-user experience expected when young people’s educations are at stake.”

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WHIPTAIL dramatically optimizes the return on investment and performance of XenDesktop by delivering it from an entirely purpose-built flash-based array and has done so for thousands of end-users. With virtual images being WRITE IO heavy, our flash-based array easily scales XenDesktop environments.

Stop by booth #13 to meet our team and find out more!

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Businesses increasingly need HPC for predictive analysis, transactional processing, pattern recognition, simulations or live experimental testing. As technology advances to upgrade products and services to gain a competitive advantage, the demand for processing power and speed will grow exponentially.

An important advantage of Flash-based storage is that it contains no mechanical parts (unlike spinning disks) and allows for data transfer to and from storage media to take place at a much higher speed, enabling applications to perform at a much higher level without any hardware storage tuning. WHIPTAIL products can significantly reduce the time required to run simulations, reports and index searches without rewriting a line of code. WHIPTAIL’s extremely high IOPS performance and ultra-low latency retrieves and analyzes robust intelligence in a timely manner.

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SDG has been a WHIPTAIL distributor since September 2012, joining the company’s rapidly-expanding Channel programme in the UK and Europe. In addition to offering WHIPTAIL’s current portfolio of all-Flash storage arrays, SDG will also roll out INFINITY installations to resellers and customers from the first quarter of next year.

Paul Eccleston, Managing Director of SDG EMEA said: “In a market where end users need to know they can rely on specialist VARs to provide the support and performance they need, we believe that partnerships like this will be crucial. There has never been a greater paradigm shift in the storage market than what is happening right now with all-Flash storage technologies. With our services capability and the ability to leverage our state-of-the-art demonstration facilities, we can accelerate our resellers’ route to market with INFINITY.”

Announced last month, INFINITY is the first hardware expansion from WHIPTAIL, enabling customers to scale up and out the company’s class-leading 72TB INVICTA array to 360TB of all-Flash storage. The array is designed to meet growing demand from enterprises that want to move more business critical applications to Flash, as they experience productivity gains with initial virtualisation roll-outs.

Sally Reade, Channel Director EMEA at WHIPTAIL added: “SDG’s enterprise technology consultants, channel services, and proof-of-concept facilities are world-class, which will provide our resellers with a wealth of resources and technical expertise, particularly in virtualisation, storage, and next-generation enterprise technologies. Ultimately this will enable them to support their customers’ ongoing requirements for exceptional IT performance.”

The channel is an absolutely pivotal route to market for WHIPTAIL in Europe, as Brian Feller, VP and General Manager of WHIPTAIL EMEA explained: “As VARs roll out an increasing number of virtualisation projects, the end users want to build flexible delivery into their IT infrastructures and business applications, as well as cope with changing market demands and business requirements with sustainable low costs. This is where our technology comes in.”

INFINITY will be available through SDG to the UK channel in the first quarter of 2013. WHIPTAIL’s full portfolio of all-Flash arrays are available from SDG now and will be demonstrated at SDG’s Business Solutions Centre located in Birmingham.

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Hi, I’m Cathy Chandler. I’m the CFO of WHIPTAIL.

My previous experience has spanned a number of industries. I probably spent the first 20 years of my career in manufacturing and then made a rather unusual change, to move into working with startup technology companies.
I did that because after studying the US economy I learned that technology really was kind of the heartbeat of what was driving our economic growth. I found it to just be really exciting, working in big manufacturing companies. I certainly don’t regret that experience. I learned a tremendous amount there. Now I can take what I learned there and really get closer to the action in a smaller company and feel that I have more of an impact on the company’s success. That’s really why I made the change.

My first startup technology company was an infrastructure company and I started with that company really from the very, very beginning, and built it to be a very successful player in the industry. I found that very, very rewarding. When that opportunity ended I found myself seeking out another very innovative technology and ended up in a technology company that focused on the social media space so again something new. I learned a lot about the marketing industry and particularly about social media that I think is really something that’s revolutionizing the world.

We sold that company to Oracle and then I found myself looking for my next opportunity, and found WHIPTAIL.
WHIPTAIL to me is just a very exciting place to be. It has brought me full circle, back to my manufacturing roots as well as looking at another new very, very innovative technology that I think is going to just revolutionize the way the storage industry operates.

I’m very excited to be here and can’t wait to dig in and make this a very, very successful company.

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Hi, this is Dan Crain, CEO of WHIPTAIL, and I’d like to talk about some wonderful news for our company, our customers and our partners.

We just announced that SanDisk had joined our company as an investor as well as a technology partner. We’re particularly honored by their investment and we are the first investment from their new SanDisk Venture Fund, which is focused on innovation and technology advancement in the areas of flash memory. We feel it is testament to our success and cultured innovation and the quality and fresh thinking and what we feel is really pretty rational behavior that we have as a company.

We love the fact that SanDisk was really thinking about the future, we’re always thinking about the future—new types of memory that are coming down the pike, new ways to store data, new ways to get it in and out faster. They are also maniacal about quality. We see it in a product everyday here. We feel that they’re the perfect partner for innovation, idea generation and new ideas and we’re just very proud, proud to be able to announce this. Thank you.

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Sumit Sandana, SanDisk’s VP and Chief Strategy Officer, says he expects this “will allow us to get really intimate with the customers we intend to serve.” Read New SanDisk Venture Fund Alights on WHIPTAIL to learn what else this relationship could bring.

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WHIPPANY, N.J. – Dec. 13, 2012 – WHIPTAIL, the data storage industry innovator powering faster and more energy-efficient computing for today’s global businesses via flash storage, today announced a $31 million investment, including strategic investments from flash-memory leader SanDisk as well as an unnamed Silicon Valley industry titan. Ignition Partners, RRE Ventures and Spring Mountain Capital also contributed to this Series C funding and Silicon Valley Bank provided debt financing.

“The intersection of performance and efficiency has never been more important as companies and organizations are moving to new technologies like flash storage to drive the top and bottom lines,” said WHIPTAIL CEO Dan Crain. “The new investors we’ve added to our existing team demonstrate the confidence they have in our vision. This funding will ensure continued growth of WHIPTAIL and accelerate our product roadmap through 2013, with groundbreaking products coming over the next 12 months that will leave our competition scrambling to catch up.”

The investment will fund growth in WHIPTAIL’s engineering team and accelerate global expansion. In addition, the company announced a new chief financial officer to lead WHIPTAIL’s fiscal policy into 2013 and beyond.

WHIPTAIL’s significant growth across its customer base, revenue and employees worldwide is a testament to the leadership and innovation provided in its all-flash storage arrays. The company has achieved triple digit year-over-year revenue growth as more than 150 customers are now utilizing WHIPTAIL’s INVICTA and ACCELA arrays to power more than a quarter of a billion IOPS. To accommodate this expansion, WHIPTAIL’s employee base has increased by almost 500 percent in 2012.

SanDisk has announced an investment in WHIPTAIL via SanDisk Ventures, the company’s newly formed strategic investment arm.

“Enterprise storage represents a significant growth opportunity for flash, and SanDisk is excited to invest in innovative companies such as WHIPTAIL, which are bringing breakthrough system solutions to their enterprise customers,” said Sumit Sadana, Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer at SanDisk. “Increasingly, customers are turning to flash-based solutions to address the need to access big data at lightning-fast speed, and do so with elegant, scalable, power-efficient systems from leading companies like WHIPTAIL.”

For Richard Fade, a partner at Ignition, the moves coming from WHIPTAIL have justified their investment in the company from the beginning.

“Enterprise SSD is white hot – it’s becoming affordable for the datacenter, enabling competitive advantage and becoming a key tier of storage in many industries and applications,” he said. “WHIPTAIL is building the best implementations in the market. While others have been building hype, WHIPTAIL has quietly been delivering the fastest, most flexible and cost effective products in the market.”

Catherine Chandler, former CFO of Vitrue and Liaison Technologies, joins WHIPTAIL executive team

On the coattails of the strategic financing agreement, WHIPTAIL announced the hiring of CFO Catherine Chandler. Chandler brings more than 25 years of experience to WHIPTAIL. She previously served as CFO of Vitrue, a social marketing technology platform purchased by Oracle in 2012, and Liaison Technologies, an integration and data management technology services company with operations in the U.S. and Europe.

“Cathy comes to us with a strong background in tech and manufacturing, two areas where her fiscal leadership will pay strong dividends for WHIPTAIL,” said Crain. “We’ve built a world class organization here in New Jersey and we need world class leadership across executive management. Adding Cathy brings Finance in line with our other divisions.”

Prior to Vitrue and Liaison Technologies, Chandler served as division controller for Georgia-Pacific and as corporate treasurer and controller for Savannah Foods & Industries.

“As a CFO, the fast-paced world of tech startups is extremely challenging,” said Chandler. “It’s all about planning, execution and sound financial management. I’ve worked with everything from the Global 100 down to startups and WHIPTAIL is as exciting an opportunity as I’ve had in my professional career.”

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AT WHIPTAIL, we’ve remained focused on what customers try to deal with and the IT problems they face. We ask ourselves who we can partner with to solve these problems and better serve the customer. And some of the time, the answer we come up with may surprise people.

The computer industry for many, many years has thrived on partnerships between companies that in certain areas of their businesses compete with each other, while in other areas partner with strategic technologies to help satisfy a need. It’s been referred to as “co-opetition,” among many other names. The storage industry is really no different. At approximately $100 billion annually, it’s a very large business with a lot of complexities and components and it has survived and thrived off such partnerships.

We prefer to work with people and companies that others may believe to be our competition rather than positioning ourselves hard against them. We can do this successfully because we’re so specialized, as well as thoughtful of others. What we do solves specific types of problems that most other companies don’t solve with their technology portfolios. This tactic has increased our opportunities and allowed us to eliminate distractions.

We regularly hear that people spend time with us because they like the way we treat them, they like the way we conduct business and, most importantly, they like that our technology does what it says it does and our company does what we say we’re going to do. We’ve made a name for ourselves by being thoughtful and ethical without really trying to poke our seemingly direct competition in the eye because that behavior doesn’t help anybody and it doesn’t serve our purpose. Our goal is to solve problems, enhance user experiences and positively affect the industry. We look forward to partnering with pretty much anybody and everybody that shares these goals.

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One of the largest emergency service units in the Netherlands, Veiligheids- en gezondheidsregio Gelderland-Midden (VGGM), has chosen WHIPTAIL ACCELA storage arrays to power an existing virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) project used in emergency situations for 16 municipalities within the Gelderland province. The deal marks WHIPTAIL’s expansion in the Benelux region, which will continue to be a key market in 2013 and beyond.

VGGM – a public sector relief organisation for fire and health serving more than 650,000 people across the province, including the municipalities of Arnhem, Westervoort, and Ede – has also powered its GEO data VDI project with WHIPTAIL’s silicon storage technology. VGGM’s relies on speedy and uninterrupted access to its built-in mapping and geographic information system (GIS), Esri ArcGIS, to get the best possible information on incident locations.

WHIPTAIL provides all-Flash storage designed to accelerate the performance of resource-hungry applications such as VDI. The company was the first to manufacture all-Flash arrays for the data centre, and is now working with a number of partners across Benelux – including Terach – to provide customers in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg with high-speed, high-performance storage. VGGM emphasizes the WHIPTAIL’s focus on the public sector market. Other key markets include education, financial services, and law and legal services.

Before introducing a Quest vWorkspace VDI platform, ArcGIS was powered by a traditional – and slower – hard disk storage area network (SAN) solution. Following a testing period against several other Flash storage vendors, WHIPTAIL ACCELA was selected by VGGM to power the VDI platform, split across two data centres 80km apart. Full implementation of WHIPTAIL ACCELA, including integration with Quest vWorkspace, took less than 24 hours.

“We needed to increase the speed and performance of the VDI as we had to eradicate any risk of causing problems for our emergency department,” commented Martijn Raaijmakers, System Administrator at VGGM. “Even by optimising the existing storage array, the cost would have been over budget and it still would not have met our requirements. During testing, WHIPTAIL ACCELA achieved a speed 10 times faster on input/outputs per second and data transfer than the nearest rival. The emergency virtual desktops can access ArcGIS anytime, anywhere and uninterrupted. Incident response times have decreased and we have achieved a significantly lower total cost of ownership compared with our incumbent hard disk solution. User feedback has been verypositive due to the performance improvement.”

Brian Feller, VP and General Manager at EMEA at WHIPTAIL added: “What is crucial about this project is that the public sector across Europe is experiencing ever-leaner IT budgets but still has challenging targets to meet in terms of providing its services to citizens. With lower power consumption, lower space consideration and better response times, VGGM is reducing overheads whilst helping even more people.”

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“The achievement of receiving VMware Ready™ status for both INVICTA and ACCELA is a great testament to our continued commitment to providing the highest quality experience for our customers,” said James Candelaria, chief technology officer and co-founder of WHIPTAIL. “We are grateful that our flash storage arrays have been awarded VMware’s highest level of endorsement.”

“We are pleased that WHIPTAIL’s INVICTA and ACCELA flash storage arrays qualify for the VMware Ready™ logo, signifying to customers that they have met specific VMware integration and interoperability standards and they work effectively with VMware cloud infrastructure, which will speed time to value within customer environments.” said Sheryl Sage, director, Alliance Programs, VMware.

The VMware Ready program is a co-branding benefit of the Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program that makes it easy for customers to identify partner products certified to work with VMware cloud infrastructure. Customers can use these products and solutions to lower project risks and realize cost savings over custom built solutions. With thousands of members worldwide, the VMware TAP program includes best-of-breed technology partners with the shared commitment to bring the best expertise and business solution for each unique customer need.

WHIPTAIL’s INVICTA and ACCELA can be found within the online VMware Solution Exchange (VSX).

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Find WHIPTAIL on the Cisco Marketplace: ACCELA and INVICTA.

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Joe Bloggs is poised, on the verge of completing a truly legendary 30-man raid on his favorite multiplayer online role-playing game. The loot–the spoils of war–is in his sights, until . . . the dreaded crash. Not only has this wonderful moment been spoiled, but Joe can never get it back–short of going through the whole process again. In fact, 93 percent of online gamers experience stalling during gaming sessions, and over a third of this group encounter the problem at least once an hour, according to new research from WHIPTAIL.

Gamers’ and gamblers’ frustrations with their online experience stem largely from constant stalling and glitching that afflicts their performance-hungry pastime. Seventy-two percent of gamers resort to playing only outside the conventional peak Internet hours of 6 p.m.-9 p.m. With nearly three quarters having quit during an online game as a result of a frustrating experience, it’s clear to see that speed is a hot topic for users.

The gaming industry is facing a huge challenge as sales of console games continue to decline by 25% year-on-year, and many developers focus their efforts on games for online environments. With the massive improvements in graphics and the ultra-fine detail of popular online games such as Call of Duty and World of Warcraft, performance is critical.

Performance is the number one expectation of gamers. As individuals fight for leisure time, especially during a recession, people are increasingly unable to allocate large periods to online gaming sessions. Our research revealed that 67% of gamers couldn’t play for more than two hours a day, and around half of this group was unable to allocate more than one hour on a daily basis. As time becomes a factor, so gamers are demanding ever-higher levels of performance during these restricted sessions.

However, these issues actually span two distinct markets. As previously mentioned, on the one hand there are the gamers who experience interruptions half way through a game, but on the other, there are also gamblers. With so many bookmakers now offering ‘real-time’ (or ‘in-play’) betting, there is even more pressure for sites to deliver constant availability of their services. The fast pace and rapidly fluctuating odds are major attractions of this new form of gambling that has become so synonymous with both sport and the financial markets. But these attractions become redundant if you encounter online performance issues – particularly during periods of increased demand for high profile events.

The data centers that host online games and gambling sites are putting huge pressure on their servers and storage systems, meaning that crashes and glitches are inevitable–but they are unacceptable to users. In addition to this, games that were once offline are now increasingly integrating online options in the form of co-operative play or DRM. With millions of players utilizing multiple servers, the industry-standard spinning disk arrays are expanding into vast server farms, requiring large amounts of energy and incurring huge climate control expenses. The industry is balancing on a tipping point.

This will help trigger a move towards newer technologies to improve performance and cope with the huge influx of data caused by the growing popularity of online gaming and gambling, as well as potentially reducing the cost of downloading gaming content for consumers.

All-flash storage is leading the charge in this new progression. Flash has the performance characteristics to consolidate those multiple servers into a single Flash array. This produces a smaller footprint, reduces energy costs and generates less heat–going a long way towards solving the spiraling climate control issues. For the consumer, this directly impacts the amount of time spent on the dreaded loading screens, virtually eliminating the wait when moving between continents.

Internet usage has more than doubled in the last year alone, and many project that data traffic will jump up to tenfold within the next five years. New technologies have the ability to bring the speed back to online gaming and are crucial to improving the consumer experience, and thus Delorfind Belithraldur will finally unearth the Belt of Crystalline Tears from the treasure chest buried deep in the hills of Northern Stranglehorn.

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