Memoir Systems

In September, 2014 it became known that Cisco intends to purchase the Memoir Systems private company which is engaged in development of intellectual property items on semiconductor memory devices and the tools allowing to assemble on the basis of ASIC schemes programmable network switches with the increased speeds. This acquisition will allow to make large volumes of an available and fast memory for the existing ASIC schemes of Cisco switches and will help further developments with this area according to requirements of information technologies of new generation.

In the market of switches for data processing centers there is a need for the increased density of ports and faster data transmission. At the same time as a result of wide dissemination of horizontally scalable (not virtualized) applications for processing of Big Data — for example, Hadoop — increases horizontal traffic (traffic between servers) and, therefore, need in more DPC dense network appears. Unfortunately, memory of normal ASIC schemes for switches is not expected so intensive loadings because of what it can limit density and performance of the next generations of switches for data processing centers.

Memoir technologies allow to resolve a problem with memory for ASIC. This company owns the patent for the software solution which increases access rate to memory to 10 times and at the same time reduces the volume of the resources necessary for memory modules in standard ASIC schemes for switches. Thus, this technology allows to develop the schemes ASIC for switches and routers with such speeds, density of ports and economy of costs which would be impossible at traditional architecture of physical memory. Increase in density and speed of ports extremely important as there is a transition from transfer to speed of 10 Gbps at 40 and 100gbit/page.

As expected, process of acquisition of Memoir Systems company will come to the end in the 1st quarter of 2015 financial year of Cisco (i.e. by November, 2014). The Memoir command will be a part of Cisco Insieme business division which is directed by the senior vice president Mario Mazzola.