Whiptail, one of the first storage vendors to start shipping all-flash-based storage arrays, on Thursday unveiled the closing of a new round of funding that includes participation by two strategic vendors.
That Series C round of funding, which brings the company $31 million, included investment from flash-memory developer SanDisk as well as from an unnamed "Silicon Valley industry titan."
With the new round, investors have poured a total of $46 million into Whippany, N.J.-based Whiptail.
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Whiptail also unveiled the hiring of Catherine Chandler as the company's new CFO. Chandler was previously the CFO of Vitrue, a social marketing technology company acquired by Oracle this fall.
Whiptail currently offers two product lines, said CEO Dan Crain.
The first is the Accela line of single-chassis all-flash storage arrays. The second is the Invicta line of enterprise-class arrays, which scale to 360 TB of flash storage.
"We believe the Invicta is the fastest storage array in the world," Crain said. "It offers over 40 GB per second of sustained throughput. That's 40 GB per second, not 40 Gbits. And it offers over 4 million IOs per second."
Both lines feature 100-percent solid-state technology, Crain said. "The only moving parts are a couple of fans," he said.
Whiptail is currently almost cash-flow positive from an operations perspective, and it is targeting profitability with the new investment, Crain said. "We're old school," he said. "We run this like a real business. We don't spend capriciously. We invest in R&D, in our people and in our customers. We're focused on making this a valuable company for customers to work with."
For SanDisk, the investment in Whiptail is a chance to work with a growing solid-state storage array developer, Crain said. "We're pushing the envelope on these technologies," he said. "They felt we were the ideal first candidate for their new venture fund."
The unnamed second strategic investor is a good partner to Whiptail in terms of sales activities, Crain said. The identity of that investor may be revealed next quarter, he said.
Whiptail exited stealth mode in 2008.
PUBLISHED DEC. 13, 2012
