Whiptail embarks on strong UK, EMEA channel push

High performance solid state storage array company Whiptail has launched Invicta, which it claims is the world’s first scale-out, modular, enterprise class SSD platform. It also announced Accela, the flash storage array.

Invicta is a 100 percent NAND flash storage array which can provide highly scalable IOPS, handle heavy bandwidth, all with low latency at a price that Whiptail claims won’t break the bank, especially when compared to HDD options.

Whiptail says that Invicta delivers the highest sustained write throughput in the industry. It can sport up to 72TB of NAND Flash, sustained bandwidth beyond 5GB/s, sustained IOPS beyond 600,000, and “nearly undetectable” latency in a multi protocol environment.

Meanwhile, Accela is an update to Whiptail’s Xlr8r, which looks at database performance, virtualised infrastructure, and applications. It includes RAID protection, hot spares, and aynchronous replication, according to the company, and has options like protected write buffers, as well as VMWare vCenter management.

Whiptail’s products are both Citrix and VMware certified. The company promises 24/7 service and support for customers.

Brian Feller, VP & GP for EMEA region, took the time to explain Whiptail’s European channel model to ChannelBiz UK. He said that, in America, the company was using the channel to spearhead the company – which fits with his channel focused background, as with the creator of the product.

“In the first two years we really hit it out of the ballpark,” Feller said. “It was tremendously fast performance, ultra low latency, and a much more cost effective price than people had seen in the past with solid state.”

Whiptail knew, Feller said, that the company needed to go through the channel. It spent two years selling with no formal investments, though there are now three venture capitalist firms involved.

“The real crux of the issue was we always had some really opportunistic successes via channel partners in EMEA, but we didn’t have our feet on the ground and focus on it, we knew we would do that when we had the right financial backing,” Feller said. “Now we’re going after that in EMEA full-board”.

The company has grown at a quick rate. Just one year ago it had 20 people on board, but now it’s roughly 100. Whiptail plans to extend its channel model which worked so well for it in the USA:

“At the end of the day,” Feller said, “if you do it right, through the channel and the disties, it is the fastest way to get your name out there”.

Whiptail claims what makes it a different vendor is that the technology it is selling is inherently different from anything else out there. Major partners and focused virtualisation partners in the States, and similar in the EU, there has been a demand for higher performance, but the options are not out there in the storage landscape, according to Whiptail. “There’s a lack of education about putting solid states into a server, or a hybrid,” Feller said. For VDIs, for example, when using Whiptail products, customers are not spending 90 percent of their VDI costs on storage – and that appeals to VARs and disties.

The company plans to take “everything” through the channel, and it will put most of its resources into channel support. There will also be direct rep, but working through the channel partners. Whiptail has already experiences success in the Nordics, and now it is focusing on the UK in particular, partnering with some of the largest VMWare and Citrix partners.

Whiptail will not be hurrying to sign up quantity, but quality partners, Feller claimed. “It’s less about the total and more about their focus,” he said. “Our main focuses will be the Nordics, UK first and foremost, then Germany, and France. And in South Africa and a bit of APAC, so further away, but opportunistically. As we continue to grow, which wil be two or three times the size we are in the UK by Autumn, we’ll have the ability to support more and more of those.

“VARs and business owners want the same things,” Feller said, “vendors that can understand their businesses that give them the tools to go out and sell”.