First Distribution to Resell Whiptail

First Distribution (Epsidon Technology Distribution Pty) has signed an agreement with WhipTail Technologies, Inc. to distribute their products throughout southern Africa.

WhipTail’s Invicta is a NAND flash storage array that provides highly scalable IO/s, total system throughput, and low latency at groundbreaking price for performance, while Accela offers a high-performance solid-state storage solution.

Installed worldwide in numerous mission-critical database, virtualisation, and online environments, WhipTail’s solid-state storage reduces delays related to HDD contention and access times, allowing servers to process more data in less time – months to days, hours to mn.

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 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. SSDs are a promising emerging technology, and integrate well with First Distribution’s reputation for distributing innovative and industry-leading products and solutions.

Ludwig Dedekind, GM of First Distribution, commented: "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 HDDs – 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 I/O speeds to users without any of the hardware degradation that these speeds usually entail."

Ludwig added: "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 GM 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 life cycles 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 TCO while moving data faster than ever," he concluded.