Whiptail (company)

Whiptail
Industry Information technology, data storage
Fate Acquired
Successor Cisco Systems
Founded 2009
Founders
  • Edward Rebholz (CEO)
  • James Candelaria (CTO)
Headquarters Whippany, New Jersey, U.S.
Key people
 Dan Crain (CEO)[1]
James Candelaria (CTO)
Aaron 'AJ' Jennings (SVP Corporate Development)
Cristobal Conde (chairman)[2]
Products ACCELA, INVICTA, INVICTA INFINITY
Website www.whiptail.com

Whiptail (styled as WHIPTAIL) was previously a privately held company that builds data storage systems out of solid-state drive components. Whiptail designed and commercialized the use of NAND flash memory as a replacement for hard disk drives in large-scale storage systems.[3] The company is named after the whiptail racerunner, a fast lizard species indigenous to the southwestern United States.[4]

On October 29, 2013,Whiptail (advised by Eric Mandl and Vikram Rao) was acquired by Cisco Systems for approximately US $415M.[5]

History

Headquartered in Whippany, New Jersey, with offices in San Jose, California and London, United Kingdom, Whiptail was founded in 2009 by Edward T Rebholz CEO and (now CTO) James Candelaria.[3] Early investors included Ignition Partners, RRE Ventures and Spring Mountain Capital. In January 2012, Series B funding was reported as "more than $10 million."[6] In December 2012, Whiptail announced a $31 million funding round. Ignition Partners led the Series C financing, with SanDisk Ventures joining as the new strategic investor (investment led by Alex Lam, Director of SanDisk Ventures), while RRE Ventures and Spring Mountain Capital also participated.[7]

Whiptail released the XLR8r in 2009. In May 2012, Whiptail announced the ACCELA all-flash storage array, and INVICTA, which featured scaling, high-availability, modular and multi-protocol technology.[8]

In November 2012, Whiptail announced INVICTA INFINITY, which they said exceeded 4 million IOPS and 40 GB/second data rate[9] and an upgrade to version 4.1. of the software RACERUNNER, which allows businesses to replicate data to a non-Whiptail target array.[10]

On January 31, 2011, former CTO of Brocade Communications Systems Dan Crain became CEO.[1] On March 12, 2013, former SunGard CEO Cristóbal Conde was named Whiptail Chairman of the Board.[2]

In 2012, Whiptail partnered with Cisco, Citrix, SanDisk, Micron and VMware.[11] Whiptail works with the Cisco VXI (Virtualization Experience Infrastructure) and the UCS (Unified Computing System).[12] INVICTA and ACCELA are verified as Citrix Ready.[13] The Citrix Ready program identifies solutions that are trusted to enhance virtualization, networking and cloud computing solutions from Citrix, including Citrix XenDesktop, XenApp, XenServer, NetScaler and GoToMeeting. In December, 2012, SanDisk announced an investment in Whiptail via SanDisk Ventures, the company’s newly formed strategic investment arm.[14] Whiptail’s INVICTA and ACCELA storage arrays achieved VMware Ready status.[15]

On September 10, 2013, Cisco announced its intent to acquire Whiptail for $415 million, with a plan to incorporate Whiptail's technology within Cisco UCS fabric offerings at a hardware and manageability level.[16]

On July 24, 2015, Cisco announced the EoL of Whiptail products, specifically the Invicta Appliance and Scaling System products.[17]

Products

Product specifications:[18]

ACCELA INVICTA INVICTA INFINITY
Application Workloads 1 - 9 1 - 60 1 - 300
Nodes 2 - 6 7 - 30
Storage Capacity 1.5 - 12 TB 6 - 72 TB 84 - 360 TB
Performance 250,000 IOPS 650,000 IOPS 800,000 - 4,000,000 IOPS
Bandwidth 1.9 GB/s 7 GB/s 40 GB/s

Competitors

Competitors include EMC XTremIO, IBM FlashSystem, Nimbus Data, Solidfire, Pure Storage, Texas Memory Systems, Violin Memory and Kaminario.[19]

References

  1. 1 2 "Dan Crain CEO, WhipTail Technologies". Edited press release in Storage Newsletter. January 31, 2011. Retrieved August 14, 2013.
  2. 1 2 "Cristobal Conde: People On The Move". New York Business Journal. March 13, 2013. Retrieved August 14, 2013.
  3. 1 2 "Company". Company web site. Whiptail. Retrieved August 14, 2013.
  4. ↑ "Nine data storage companies to watch". International Data Group. Retrieved 18 March 2013.
  5. ↑ "Cisco Completes Acquisition of Whiptail". Retrieved 2013-10-29. Cisco Press Release
  6. ↑ "Flash Array Maker Whiptail Secures More Than $10 Million for NJ Expansion". NJ Tech Weekly. Retrieved 18 March 2013.
  7. ↑ "Whiptail raises $31 million". Storage Bytes Now. Retrieved 18 March 2013.
  8. ↑ "Whiptail whips up modularly scalable all-flash storage array". Computer World. Retrieved 18 March 2013.
  9. ↑ "Whiptail Unveils 360TB All-NAND Flash Array". eWeek. Retrieved 18 March 2013.
  10. ↑ Cormac Hogan (November 20, 2012). "WHIPTAIL Announce 4.1.1 Update". Blog. Retrieved August 14, 2013.
  11. ↑ "Whiptail Strategic Partners". Whiptail. Retrieved 18 March 2013.
  12. ↑ "Cisco Marketplace". Cisco. Retrieved 18 March 2013.
  13. ↑ "Citrix Ready Marketplace". Citrix. Retrieved 18 March 2013.
  14. ↑ "New SanDisk Venture Fund Alights on Whiptail". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 18 March 2013.
  15. ↑ "Whiptail's INVICTA and ACCELA Achieve VMware Ready™ Status". Bloomberg. Retrieved 18 March 2013.
  16. ↑ "Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire WHIPTAIL". Cisco. Retrieved 11 September 2013.
  17. ↑ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/24/whipped_tails_acquisition_angst_and_attrition/
  18. ↑ "Whiptail Products". Whiptail. Retrieved 18 March 2013.
  19. ↑ Stephen Foskett (February 14, 2012). "Nimbus E-Class: The First Big, Redundant, All-Flash Enterprise Array". Grestalt IT. Retrieved August 14, 2013.
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