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Whiptail today announced that the company had completed a round of Series C funding valued at $31 million. SanDisk, a maker of flash memory storage products and “an unnamed Silicon Valley industry titan” led the transaction with backing from Ignition Partners, RRE Ventures and Spring Mountain Capital.
While the mystery venture capitalist is being kept under wraps, Whiptail CEO Dan Crain is making no secret about where the money is going.
“This funding will ensure continued growth of Whiptail and accelerate our product roadmap through 2013, with groundbreaking products coming over the next 12 months that will leave our competition scrambling to catch up,” says Crain in press remarks.
Momentum Builds for All-Flash Storage
To date, Whiptail’s all-flash Invicta and Accela storage systems have found a place in the IT setups and data centers of over 150 customers. The company boasts that the arrays are helping those companies plow through big workloads at over a quarter of a billion IOPS.
The Whippany, N.J.-based flash storage specialist said that its employee headcount has exploded over the past year, growing by almost 500 percent in 2012. Whiptail is also closing more sales, generating “triple digit revenue growth year-over-year,” said the company.
Whiptail’s all-flash strategy dovetails nicely with the enterprise storage ambitions of one of its lead funders, SanDisk.
SanDisk Eyes the Enterprise
In June, SanDisk launched its Lightning PCIe Solid State Accelerator line of affordable PCIe flash server cards in a bid to bring its NAND technology into the data center. Today, SanDisk is betting that increased flash adoption among business IT departments enterprise will validate its investment in the startup.
Sumit Sadana, Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer at SanDisk, said, “Enterprise storage represents a significant growth opportunity for flash, and SanDisk is excited to invest in innovative companies such as WHIPTAIL, which are bringing breakthrough system solutions to their enterprise customers.”
Leave it to Big Data to spark demand. “Increasingly, customers are turning to flash-based solutions to address the need to access big data at lightning-fast speed, and do so with elegant, scalable, power-efficient systems from leading companies like Whiptail,” added Sadana.
Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Internet News, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.
