Start-Up’s Profile: WhipTail Tech

Company: WhipTail Technologies, Inc. (named after the WhipTail Racerunner lizard, an extremely fast species indigenous to SW USA)

Headquarters: In Summit, NJ, and recent management team addition based in the California Bay Area.

Born in: 4Q08

Funding: Undisclosed amount of angel seed funding

Revenues and profitability: 2010 revenues surpassed 2009, and expected in seven-digits for CY 2010. The start-up is not far from profitability.

Main executives:

• Ed Rebholz, CEO and co-founder, former CEO of TheAdmins, an IT integrator firm, and VP of sales at VC-backed DWL, acquired by IBM
• James Candelaria, CTO and co-founder, previously CTO of TheAdmins IT
• Brian Feller, VP of sales and operations, formerly director of sales, Citrix Northeast Region

Number of employees: 10
 
Technology and products:
The company proposes four 2U patent-pending SAN appliances with SSDs (from OCZ) only: Racerunner 1500 (1.5TB), 3000 (3TB), 6000 (6TB) and 7500 (7.5TB), starting at $49,000 for a 1.5TB system. They run at 150,000 IO/s for 4K blocks with 0.1ms latency, 180W power consumption, and using RAID-0, -5, -6 or -10. Interfaces offered to the host are two GbE, 10GbE, 4Gb FC, 40Gb IB with FC, iSCSI, IB, NFS and CIFS protocols.

Racerunner utilizes proprietary wear-leveling technologies embedded on the drives that evenly distribute data across all of the available storage space during write operations. This eliminates the constant re-use of one small portion of the storage medium – one of the main problem for SSDs – and extends the lifetime storage of the data to "beyond seven years".

To reduce used flash capacity, WhipTail has integrated inline de-dupe (where data redundancy is eliminated on the ingress at a block level) and compression using notably Exar’s Hifn BitWackr cards. It stated that it achieves up to 300:1 reduction ratio with virtualization environments, and typically 4:1 for database and NAS.

Few days ago, the start-up announced the availability of an new SSD device, the Racerunner Virtual Desktop XLR8r, starting at $49,000 and specifically designed to optimize IO-demanding virtual desktop infrastructure images, with the support of Citrix, VMware and Microsoft virtual desktop environments.
 
Distributors:

• VARs in USA: M7 (Intra Systems, Gotham, IPM, LPS, Entisys, AEC, Right! Systems), all Citrix Platinum and VMware partners, Centrinet (Citrix Platinum), Ntersect Networks (Citrix Gold), TheAdmins (Citrix Platinum) and INX
• VADs in Europe: Consolidate IT, Network Attached Storage (UK) and B&C

Main customers: Fareportal (Cheapoair.com), University of Groningen (Netherlands), Veolia, Altus Group (Canada)

Applications: Virtual desktops (Citrix, VMware, Microsoft, Symantec, Quest), VMware ESX (server virtualization), SQL, Oracle, email (Microsoft, Exchange, etc.), OLTP

Competitors: Violin Memory Systems, Texas Memory Systems, Nimbus Data Systems