Data storage startup Whiptail says that its income tripled last year thanks to 130 new enterprise customers. The company makes power-efficient flash storage arrays that offer both speed and significantly less overhead.

“Predictions for the demise of traditional rotational storage arrays and hard disk drives (HDD) are becoming more frequent as flash vendors continue to improve quality, capacity, and longevity,” said Gary MacFadden, founder of Parity Research. “Buyers looking to exploit solid state disk and accelerate application efficiency and dramatically improve user experience without breaking the bank should consider vendors such as Whiptail. They have a proven solution to meet the needs of price-conscious customers who also desire a major performance boost.”

Whiptail credits 300 percent year-over-year growth to aggressive hiring and a lot of hard work. The company’s staff increased fivefold in the past 12 months, and it launched several additional storage arrays, as well as an improved version of its replication solution.  Invicta Infinity, one of the new flash boxes, is still touted as one of the highest performing solution of its kind on the market, with 4 million IOPS and 40GB/second throughput.

Other milestones include partnerships with several major vendors such as VMware, and a $31 million funding round in December.  SanDisk  led the Series C financing, while  Ignition Partners, RRE Ventures and  Spring Mountain Capital also chipped in.

Whiptail’s success reflects an explosion in enterprise demand for products that can help convert data into actionable insight and a stronger bottom line.  Tokutek brings its own validation to this trend with news that its customer base doubled in 2012.  The database vendor develops MySQL solutions that perform better than legacy alternatives without abandoning the familiar interface that users have grown to know, if not love.

For more analysis on Whiptail’s disruptive entry into the flash sector is Wikibon analyst Stu Miniman.