Whiptail Accela pricing a half million bucks?

Original article by Chris Mellor at The Register

Enterprise flash array vendor Whiptail….

…By developing the WT-1100 for the entry-level market, Whiptail is positioning itself below the market position occupied by Violin Memory. That could, in turn, put other flash array vendors such as Nimbus Data under pricing pressure.

A 12TB ACCELA is listed at $588,000; that’s $49,000/TB. On that basis, a 4TB WT-1100 could cost $196,000: El Reg feels this would be far too high for a branch office/SME customer. For comparison, a 16TB 4-disk WD Sentinel 1U rackmount storage server is listed at $2,349 retail. But that only comes with a measly dual Atom processor combo running the show.

Whiptail says the WT-1100 starting price is under $20,000. For comparison, ten per cent of the theoretical equivalent 4TB ACCELA price would be $19,600.

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Compare SSD Flash Memory Vendors with Pricing

UPDATE: Pure Storage lawyers requested that we remove all pricing information (publicly available with a quick search). We complied.

This post highlights the most popular Solid State Disk/Flash vendors and provides a chart to help decipher their costs. This data has been aggregated from various sources so no claims are made as to its accuracy.

In some cases the manufacturers provide a link to “Self-Service Pricing” via EchoQuote™ so you can get up to date pricing information quickly, often in minuts (last column).

Top 10 Solid State/Flash Array Vendors in Alphabetical order:

Vendor Category Pricing
Astute Networks Flash Memory Arrays Not Available
Fusion-io Pricing Solid-State PCI Express Cards (Nexsan acquisition may put it on path to full appliance gear) Not Available
Range $2-$5/GB
Nimbus Data Pricing Flash Memory Arrays Not Available
Per 2012 article – $150K for 10TB dual configuration
OCZ Pricing Flash PCI Express Cards Not Available
Range $2-$5/GB
Skyera Pricing Flash Memory Arrays Not Available
Texas Memory Systems Pricing PCI Cards
Flash Memory Arrays
Not Available
Virident Pricing PCI Cards
Flash PCI Express Cards
Flash Max II
Starts at $6000
VIOLIN Systems Pricing NVMe Flash Arrays Velocity cards come in 1.37, 2.75, 5.5 and 11TB raw capacity versions at a list price cost of $6/GB for all of them except the entry-level 1.37TB card which lists at $3/GB.Flash Max II
Get a Self-Service Quote at our Violin Systems Pricing page.
Whiptail Pricing PCI Cards
Flash Memory Arrays
From $50K to $250K for multi-terabyte arrays
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Whiptail Storage Pricing

Excerpt only, see complete article from StorageSearch

Note: the pricing mentioned here is part of Whiptail’s history and is probably outdated. As always, the manufacturer is your best source for current budgetary pricing…if they will provide it!

In February 2009 – WhipTail Tech announced details of its iSCSI compatible 2U rackmount RAID protected SSDs. Available with 1.5TB (price approx $60,000) or 3TB capacities the systems internally use COTS flash SSDs managed by EasyCo’s MFT technology which significantly improves write IOPS and endurance….

In July 2009 – WhipTail Technologies announced a 6TB version of its 2U SSD appliance. Pricing starts at $46,000 for a 1.5 TB system.

WhipTail’s CEO, Ed Rebholz said “One of Tier 0 storage’s downfalls to date has been the perception within the industry that it’s too expensive. Since WhipTail’s introduction earlier this year, we’ve already made significant strides in helping our industry peers to gain a new perspective. And in introducing the 6TB capacity, not only is WhipTail setting the bar for performance, footprint and affordability, but now we’re the SSD capacity leader.”

Editor’s comments:- it’s certainly the highest density server acceleration SSD I’m aware of. But you should be aware that the internal flash is MLC (and not SLC) which is a bird of a different feather. The memory type wasn’t stated in the original text of the press release.

A company spokesperson assured me that WhipTail manages the write cycle to ensure that the MLC disks last a minimum of 7 years when under load.

Other competing 2U SSDs in this capacity range include:- the RamSan-620 a 5TB SLC flash SSD from Texas Memory Systems and the Violin 1010 a 4TB SLC flash SSD from Violin Memory.

In October 2009 – WhipTail Technologies became the 1st SSD appliance company to market integrated in-line deduplication. WhipTail announced it will ship its newly renamed Racerunner (6TB) NAS SSDs with Exar’s Hifn BitWackr deduplication and compression solution in Q4 2009. Racerunner has demonstrated deduplication performance in excess of 1Gbps.

In February 2010 – StorageSearch.com published a new directory on the subject of – Solid State Storage Backup (S3B).

In March 2010 – WhipTail Technologies announced a Europe wide distribution and support agreement with Consolidate IT.

In April 2010 – WhipTail Technologies published a white paper which discusses how SSD acceleration can economically close the scaling performance gap which comes from virtual desktops and compares the SSD vs HDD array costs for a 5,000 virtual user system.

Although there’s nothing in this article which introduces new SSD acceleration architectural concepts – the 13 page document is a clearly written modern introduction to anyone interested in learning about how SAN centric SSDs can accelerate common applications. …read the article (pdf)

In August 2010 – in an effort to improve its prospects in the datacenter WhipTail Technologies announced a new name for its NAS SSDs – Datacenter XLR8r instead of Racerunner – and also unveiled HA options which involve dual failover systems. The little lizardy creatures are still on WhipTail ‘s site. Serious SSD buyers aren’t scared by animal brands.

In September 2010 – WhipTail Tech’s CTO, James Candelaria shared his SSD Bookmarks with readers of StorageSearch.com.

In August 2011 – Enterprise Strategy Group published a test report on WhipTail Technologies’ 2U iSCSI SSD appliance in a simulated 300 desktop VMware / W7 environment. Applications ran glitch free – even when a flash drive was removed.

In January 2012 – WhipTail announced it has secured a Series B funding round led by RRE Ventures, with Ignition Partners and Spring Mountain Capital also participating.

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