WhipTail promises no bull 6TB SSD

Start-up WhipTail Technologies has announced a whopping 6TB solid state drive (SSD). This fits into a 2U rack enclosure, WhipTail says, making it the highest-capacity SSD appliance available to mid- to large-sized enterprises, with this footprint. You can use the 2U case for 1.5TB, 3TB or 6TB of flash, multi-level cell (MLC) …

[Chris C]

Holy overpricing, Batman!

"You can use the 2U case for 1.5TB, 3TB or 6TB of flash, multi-level cell (MLC) flash that is." ... "Pricing starts at $60,000 for a 1.5TB system. That is a $40/GB price which should be below the Violin Memory pricing."

Wow. Don't get me wrong, I know that it has more than just the MLC flash disks, but $60,000 can buy a LOT of SLC disks which could be bought and arrayed for that price. The Intel X-25 Extreme 64GB SLC SATA II SSD goes for about $700. Assuming one parity disk for each three data disks, that'd be $2800 for 192GB. To reach 1.5TB, it'd cost $22,400 for the top-of-the-line SLC disks.

WhipTail's product is using MLC disks where a 128GB MLC SSD goes for about $300-350. Assuming one parity disk for each three data disks, that'd be $1400 for 384GB. To reach 1.5TB, it'd cost $5,600 for the disks. Even if you did RAID1, it'd only cost $8,400 for the disks. Does the rest of that device (controllers, NICs, power supply, etc) came anywhere close to $54,400 or $51,600? I highly doubt it.

I know that these devices are more than a simple RAID1 or RAID5 array, and I know that the companies have to recoup their R&D, and I even know that these types of devices have large profit margins built in. But still, based on the cost of the disks, it seems like they could have done an SLC array and still come in at a much lower cost (not to mention a massively increased lifespan).

[Joe Greer]

Just run Solaris and ZFS

You take one dell PE905 server with 128 gig of ram and pack in two shelves of 2.5 drives and do RAID10, you have 4k in 64 gig intel SSD bare drives for cache and 4k in sata 500g drives, 10k in shelves and 12k in the dell server. That is 30k for 10TB and you can grow it for ever with ZFS.

You will just need a competent Unix/Linux guy and not a MCSE certified monkey.

[Heff]

I dont get it

If you need the crazy speed, you go with SLC racks. If you dont need the crazy speed, you're probably still using non-SSD racks. It comes across like they're trying for second place and then charging and arm and a leg for it.

Given how SSD tech is improving right now, this just seems like a product without a niche; am I missing something?

maybe the answers are in my coat

[Jan 7]

Overpricing?

I´m not that sure whether the thing is overpriced. They most probably don´t have regular SATA drives attached since they need dual-port drives to protect against contoller failure. Which adds another 16port controller. Then casing, PSU, interface cards, some brains in between and finally quite some "buffer" to give those huge discounts enterprise customers learned to expect.

Personally, I wouldn´t expect anyone to pay more than 45k for one.

Nope, on second look: thats quite an aggressive price.

To make it look even better: to add a 800GB rank of stec zeus to our DS8k would cost around 100k, and we already have most of the box.

[Chris Mellor 1]

Whiptail pricing

Whiptail tells us that the pricing for the 1.5TB box is $46,000 - which is just under $31/TB which should be below the Violin Memory pricing.

Chris.

[Andy Barber]

640kb...

... should be enough!