WhipTail and Consolidate IT Partner with Softcat

WhipTail Tech, manufacturer of flash-based enterprise solid-state SAN appliances, Softcat, a VMware Premier Partners in the United Kingdom and Consolidate IT, a VAD of emerging technologies in the UK and Europe, announced a formal partnership dedicated to solving the IO performance challenges currently confronting data centers everywhere.

WhipTail’s XLR8r line of solid-state appliances is purpose-built with proprietary software designed to accelerate high IO applications such as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), email and databases that traditional storage is struggling to support.

Softcat specializes in assisting UK SME and mid-market UK organisations to build dynamic and available infrastructures using virtualisation and shared storage. Often in these scenarios, they are educating customers about the benefits of this approach and the technologies involved. They are frequently trusted with the design, implementation and support of a company’s first SAN.

"We find our customers love and become passionate advocates of virtualisation technologies, and want to use them wherever possible to solve business issues. One of the main issues we are seeing at present is around the desktop estate. Many organisations have aging Windows XP deployments and a real need, often from an employee satisfaction point of view, to refresh them and move to Windows 7," said Sam Routledge, solutions director at Softcat. "However, they recognise that they can’t afford to continue to do desktops the way they always have done. The virtual desktop approach when properly implemented solves a lot of problems – desktop management and patching, flexible working, continuity of systems access, device independence. However, it presents significant cost challenge in terms of the requirement for significant amounts of storage hardware – not necessarily in terms of capacity, but simply in terms of performance to drive the required IOPS to support an excellent consumer experience."

Upgrading an existing SAN can also mean throwing a large number of disks into the array simply to solve a performance problem, where the resulting over-capacity could be considered a waste. These new and stalled VDI projects are where the WhipTail solution fits in – as a strategic enabler for desktop virtualisation projects.

"It’s a cost-effective way of delivering the performance required, without over-provisioning. We see WhipTail de-risking virtual desktop deployments by taking away the most risky element of such a project – poor performance leading to user dissatisfaction," said Routledge.

Consolidate IT’s specialty lies in delivering more performance, speed and capacity for less money and energy in the areas of storage and networking.

"The market for virtual desktops is poised for explosive growth in 2011 and 2012," said Jur Faber, CEO of Consolidate IT. "Over the past 18 months, we’ve seen many internal POCs and some tactical deployments. This year, our clients actively want to rollout to a much broader user base. The WhipTail XLR8r creates that TCO. It just makes sense."

"We’ve been able to get up to speed from a sales and technical point of view really quickly with the support of WhipTail and Consolidate IT – the hands-on, just-get-the-job-done attitude that they have really suits us and our customers’ demands. With several satisfied customers already under our belts, we are looking forward to taking the WhipTail message out to many more," said Routledge.

"At its essence, WhipTail is a partner-focused company. We recognise the incredible value the VAR and VAD community offers, and the responsibility that comes along with that – the underlying trust and support required to validate our VARs’ efforts. We have built our VIPER partner program to maximize their business investment in WhipTail," said Brian Feller, VP of sales and marketing at WhipTail. "Softcat is a perfect example of the type of company WhipTail covets; their value-proposition to their clients is clear – they are truly viewed as trusted advisors."