Cisco to purchase solid-state memory company Whiptail for $415 million

September 2013

Cisco, a networking equipment maker giant, said it plans to integrate Whiptail’s solid-state memory technology into its unified computing system (UCS) products and devices.

Under the line items of the transaction, Cisco will $415 million in cash and retention-based incentives for Whippany, N.J.-based Whiptail. The deal is expected to close in Cisco‘s fiscal first quarter, which ends in late October. Cisco’s planned acquisition highlights the run on solid-state memory companies. On Monday, Western Digital scooped up Virident for $685 million.

According to Cisco, privately held Whiptail will boost performance in UCS by speeding applications. Cisco plans to integrate data acceleration technologies into its compute layer.

Whiptail employees will be integrated into Cisco’s computing systems group.  Cisco states: “Whiptail is a perfect architectural fit for UCS because together the two combine a clustered architecture with fabric-based acceleration – all of which is automatable via the UCS Manager and UCS Director. The end result is to deliver optimized performance on top of UCS for emerging and business critical applications, such as virtualized, Big Data, database, High Performance Computing and transcoding workloads.”

Time will only tell.