Cisco Systems Inc., today announced plans to acquire New Jersey-based solid state memory systems developer Whiptail for $415 million to bolster its data centre strategy.
Upon completion of the purchase Whiptail employees will be integrated into Cisco’s computing products group. The acquisition is expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2014.
“With the acquisition of whiptail Cisco is evolving the UCS (unified computing system) architecture by integrating data acceleration capability into the compute layer,” the network gear maker said in statement. “Integrating Whiptail’s memory system with UCS at a hardware and manageability level will simply customer’s data centre environments by delivering the required performance in a fraction of the data centre floor space with unified management for provisioning and administration.”
Whiptail specializes in in highly scalable, flash-based arrays. Its high-end system can scale up to 360TB of storage at four million input/output operations per second (IOPS). The company’s low-end offerings range from thee to 12 TB operating at 250,000 IOPS.
System (UCS) and data centre strategy.
The systems are ideal for applications where speed is critical such as analytics and video transcoding. With Whiptail’s technology in its stable, Cisco will be well-positioned to compete in a space where virtual desktops and data analytics are creating increasing performance demands on traditional storage arrays.
UCS features such as built-in automation and high performance fabrics, compliment Whiptail’s high performance data services. UCS, Whiptail and Cisco’s Nexus data centre switches will accelerate Cisco’s innovation in the converged infrastructure space.
Solid state memory systems need to be brought closer to the application level in order to bridge the gap between increasing application performance demands from servers and what storage systems can deliver, said Cisco.
“As we continue to innovate our unified platform, Whiptail will help us realize our vision of scalable persistent memory which is integrated into the server, available as a fabric resource and manageable as a global shared pool,” said Paul Perez, vice-president of Cisco’s computing systems product group.