Softcat has selected the WHIPTAIL INVICTA silicon storage array to power over 1,000 seats on its internal virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), as well as the scalable, performance storage backbone at the heart of the reseller’s managed service offering. Due to go live at the end of September at Softcat’s data centre, the 36TB array will significantly increase the performance of its VDI service, benefiting thousands of customers across the UK.

The WHIPTAIL INVICTA storage array will complement Softcat’s incumbent capacity storage tier of 100 per cent spinning disk and will fuel the VAR’s managed service for VDI, database and other high performance applications that require high input/outputs per second of READ and WRITE data, throughput and minimised latency. Softcat selected WHIPTAIL after aggressively evaluating several other major suppliers, including other all-Flash vendors, but WHIPTAIL outperformed the competition on performance tests and ease of scalability. As the VMware reseller of the year experiences rapid and continual growth, these are all critical elements to its ongoing success.

“Softcat has been working with WHIPTAIL since early 2011 on a number of in-house virtualisation and VDI projects for our customers, but it was time to practice what we preach – in both senses of the word!” said Sam Routledge, Solutions Director at Softcat. “WHIPTAIL is very highly regarded by our customers, as it makes truly high performance storage a reality and for many, it has transformed the way their businesses operate. WHIPTAIL de-risks VDI deployments by eradicating the most risky element of such a project; poor performance, which inevitably leads to user dissatisfaction.”

Simon Walker, Managed Services Director at Softcat added: “Softcat has worked hard to build a virtualisation practice that is second to none; we are now looking to replicate this success with our managed services team, and the deployment of WHIPTAIL is a key element to this future success.”

The WHIPTAIL INVICTA silicon storage array scales to 72TB and in performance tests has achieved 650,000 READ IOPs and 550,000 WRITE IOPs, with over 7GB bandwidth and <0.2ms latency. WHIPTAIL leads the way in Flash-based storage, being the first to widely adopt MLC NAND flash and making it enterprise ready. WHIPTAIL offers a seven year drive wear endurance guarantee, through wear-leveling technology implemented within its RACE RUNNER operating system, instilling customer confidence when deploying Flash storage.

Dave Johnson, Channel Manager at WHIPTAIL EMEA said: “Softcat is the leading WHIPTAIL reseller in the UK and this project will help to propel our relationship further and continue to build upon this success.”

Brian Feller, VP and GM of WHIPTAIL EMEA concluded: “It is always a testament to our company and our technology when we are trusted by world-class visionary companies such as Softcat, not only to partner with them, but also to be adopted as a key element of their managed service arm.”

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About Softcat
Softcat (www.softcat.com) is a leading provider of software licensing, hardware, security and related IT services. Softcat, founded in 1993 by chairman and majority shareholder Peter Kelly, remains privately owned and currently employs more than 400 people. It achieved a turnover in excess of £300 million in its last financial year and has been profitable since inception, resulting in a strong balance sheet and very firm financial foundations.

The company sells and supports products and solutions from all the world's leading IT companies. On all its portfolio products and solutions it offers a full range of services, including advice and guidance, technical design, product sourcing, implementation, support and project management. It enjoys a trading relationship with over 2,000 longstanding customers, predominantly from the UK corporate sector but also including large enterprises, small businesses and public sector organisations. As an organisation Softcat cares passionately about two things – outstanding employee satisfaction and world-class customer service. It believes the former drives the latter.

About WHIPTAIL
WHIPTAIL commercialised the first NAND Flash Silicon Storage Array (SSA), which dramatically improves application performance while consuming less energy than legacy storage arrays. Installed worldwide, WHIPTAIL’s systems enable databases, virtualised and online environments to process more data in significantly less time. WHIPTAIL’s customers experience substantial operational improvements because data processing time shrinks from days to hours or hours to minutes. Move your data at the speed of life at www.whiptail.com.

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Editorial contacts
Joanna Cannon
Spreckley Partners
Tel: 020 7388 9988
Email: [email protected]