Cisco is planning to acquire storage system manufacturer Whiptail under a $415m, marking its first entry into the data storage market.
Established in 2008 in New Jersey, Whiptail produces storage systems based on flash memory chips that accelerate the transfer of high volume data transfer through servers.
The acquisition is anticipated to strengthen the networking firm’s Unified Computing System (UCS) strategy, while boosting application performance through the incorporation of solid state memory into the UCS’s fabric computing architecture.
Cisco Computing Systems Product Group vice president and general manager Paul Perez said that the company is working on providing a converged infrastructure including compute, network and high performance solid state that will help address users’ requirements for next-generation computing environments.
"As we continue to innovate our unified platform, WHIPTAIL will help realise our vision of scalable persistent memory which is integrated into the server, available as a fabric resource and managed as a globally shared pool," Perez said.
According to Cisco, the integration of Whiptail’s memory systems with UCS at a hardware and manageability level would abridge customers’ data centre environments by offering required performance in a smaller data centre floor space together with unified management for provisioning and administration.
UCS and WHIPTAIL, together with the networking firm’s Nexus data centre switches, would boost the company’s innovation and momentum in the converged infrastructure.
After acquisition in 1Q14, employees from Whiptail will be integrated into Cisco’s Computing Systems Product Group led by Paul Perez.
