Cisco Buys Flash Storage Specialist WHIPTAIL For $415 Million

Cisco (CSCO) announced its intent to acquire solid state memory systems provider WHIPTAIL for approximately $415 million. As an addition to Cisco's UCS strategy WHIPTAIL will enhance application performance by integrating scalable solid state memory into the UCS's fabric computing architecture.

"We are focused on providing a converged infrastructure including compute, network and high performance solid state that will help address our customers' requirements for next-generation computing environments," said Paul Perez, vice president and general manager, Cisco Computing Systems Product Group.  "As we continue to innovate our unified platform, WHIPTAIL will help realize our vision of scalable persistent memory which is integrated into the server, available as a fabric resource and managed as a globally shared pool."

The Cisco UCS architecture evolves, by integrating data acceleration capability into the compute layer. Integrating WHIPTAIL's memory systems with UCS at a hardware and manageability level will simplify customers' data center environments by delivering the required performance in a fraction of the data center floor space with unified management for provisioning and administration. UCS's architectural advantages such as built-in automation and high performance fabrics complement WHIPTAIL's high performance data services. UCS and WHIPTAIL, together with Cisco Nexus data center switches, will accelerate Cisco innovation and momentum in the converged infrastructure.

The Cisco-WHIPTAIL deal is the second SSD/Flash deal this week, following Western Digital's acquisition of Virident.

For more from WHIPTAIL, see "Data Storage in Flux – Time for a Radical Change?," the Aug. 27 Industry Perspectives column from WHIPTAIL CEO Dan Crain.