WHY SSD

It was simply a matter of physics and time.

The year was 1999 when traditional spinning disk storage reach its apex of 15,000 RPM with an output of 200 IOs per second (IOPS). In the end, that is as fast as they would ever go. The reality is that HDDs cannot physically spin any faster (unless you want mini-sonic booms inside your servers…unlikely). Bluntly: they hit the laws of physics. During this decade, Intel and AMD went into over-drive on processor development, creating faster and more IO demanding processors that far out-paced traditional hard disk drives.

Therefore, enterprises did what enterprises do; they spent, and dramatically over-provisioned and bloated their storage infrastructure to gain only modest performance increases.  Seemingly small latencies and data bottlenecks begot poor application performance, which begot higher IT spend on legacy rotational media, which affected business negatively, which created a higher TCO as infrastructure size and scope grew. The end result still did not address the root problem: IOs.

“The fact is there are few among IT professionals who realize how often IOs play into application performance”- Taneja Group 2011.

WhipTail’s solid-state storage array fully leverages the promise of a flash-based storage medium, in this case MLC flash. Most commonly seen in the consumer market, MLC flash allows the XLR8r to be the first cost-effective, enterprise-class storage array to be accepted by the marketplace.  Neither a caching appliance or PCie card, the XLR8r is highly tuned for low latency in high IO environments thanks to its proprietary Racerunner Operating System (RROS).  Racerunner overcomes another challenge of solid-state in general–wear endurance.  The otherwise minimal lifetime of a flash drive extends to beyond 7.5 years while the underlying flash architecture is optimized.

Offering real-world performance numbers of 250,000 IOPS with a jaw-dropping 0.1 MS of latency, the XLR8r is purpose-built, its underlying technology completely “de-coupled” from all previous attempts to solve that fundamental IT issue: IOs.

 

Find out how we utilize flash to mitigate Database and Virtual Desktop IO constraints with our XLR8r storage array.