AMD Starts Using WhipTail SSDs Instead of HDDs

One would think that Advanced Micro Devices would only look at storage offerings from the best-known corporations but, apparently, that is not the case.

Though WhipTail doesn't actually make the news as often as SanDisk, Lexar or OCZ (to name a few), it does not exactly make a point of offering consumer products either.

Nevertheless, it clearly seems to know what it is doing on the SSD market.

After all, Advanced Micro Devices would probably not have selected its products otherwise.

What WhipTail has just revealed is that AMD chose to use its solid state drive for the System Optimization Engineering Department.

480 15K drives have been replaced by WhipTail's NAND Flash-based units so that response times may be quickened.

AMD apparently decided on WhipTail's solutions because the SSDs support all storage interfaces and protocols out of the box.

“WhipTail’s interface flexibility is unparalleled. Other options would provide one (maybe two) interfaces or protocols; WhipTail supports them all. This factor alone simplifies things immensely; it enables us to allocate WhipTail’s performance quickly among multiple types of workloads,“ said Fred Abounader, MTS (member of technical staff) performance systems engineer in AMD’s System Optimization Engineering Department.

“What’s also key is that the WhipTail solid-state array arrives pre-configured for performance – eliminating the need for us to do the amount of storage tuning required with our old setup and allowing us to once again be the systems engineers we’re meant to be, rather than the storage performance engineers we had become.”

AMD's System Optimization Engineering Department supposedly achieved a 50x latency improvement and a 40% boost to overall performance after the new storage devices were installed.

“Given the comprehensiveness of the interfaces and protocols we support out of the box, not only does WhipTail plug into existing environments, but it can support the growing high IO environments that enterprises are adopting over the next five years,” said Brian Feller, CMO at WhipTail.

“This value is something that seems so obvious but that is often overlooked within the industry. There are companies like AMD though that recognize that value and are positioning themselves as innovators as a result.”