Whiptail‘s just brought in a $31 million Series C funding round, the result of some strategic investments from SSD maker SanDisk and a “Silicon Valley titan” whose name was not disclosed; capital from Ignition Partners, RRE Ventures and  Spring Mountain Capital; and debt financing from Silicon Valley Bank.

Whiptail makes flash-powered storage arrays, branded Invicta and Accela, which measure performance at a quarter million IOSP and offer 60 times less latency than competing systems. The offerings are optimized for database management systems and analytical environments that require consistently fast access to information.

Clients include the city of Delware, Finkelstein & Partners and a major UK-based pension fund.

“The intersection of performance and efficiency has never been more important as companies and organizations are moving to new technologies like flash storage to drive the top and bottom lines,” said Whiptail CEO Dan Crain.  “The new investors we’ve added to our existing team demonstrate the confidence they have in our vision. 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.”

Whiptail will use the money to grow its engineering team, which is 500 percent bigger today than in December 2011, and continue to expand operations. The startup also hired Catherine Chandler as its new CFO, an industry vet who served as the head financial wiz for Vitrue and Liason Technologies before signing up with Whiptail.

Flash handles data 17 times faster than DRAM, according to a recent Wikibon study. There’s plenty of demand more than enough justification for it, but the flash value proposition goes beyond raw performance. Organizations want their storage to not only be fast but also cost effective, and Whiptail is addressing this exact demand with its focus on reducing the power bill.