Whiptail

2013: Whiptail purchase

Cisco announced in the fall of 2013 intention to purchase private company. The Whiptail company from the State of New Jersey will strengthen the strategy of Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) and will increase performance of applications by embedding of solid state drives in computing architecture of UCS.

Applications of new type (for example, virtual desktops and means of analytical data processing) impose increased requirements to the capacity of traditional disk arrays. To overcome a gap between the growing performance of applications generating the increased demand for server resources and opportunities of traditional storage systems, it is necessary to place solid state drives as it is possible closer to the application. Acquisition of Whiptail company means that Cisco develops architecture of UCS, implementing possibilities of the accelerated data processing at the computing level. Embedding of the drives Whiptail in the UCS system at the hardware level and at the level of management will simplify data processing centers at customers and will allow to try to obtain the necessary performance at simultaneous reduction of working areas and implementation of the unified control functions and selection of resources.

Architectural advantages of UCS (the built-in automation equipment, high-performance factory) serve as good addition to the high-performance services of Whiptail connected with data storage. The UCS and Whiptail systems together with the Cisco switches Nexus for DPCs will accelerate development of innovations in Cisco company and will give a new impulse to development of convergent infrastructure.

Upon completion of the transaction the staff of Whiptail will be a part of division of computing systems which is headed by Paul Perez. Under the terms of the signed agreement, Cisco will acquire all shares of Whiptail, having paid for them about 415 million dollars the cash and privileges directed to employee retention. The deal on acquisition of Whiptail company is supposed to be closed in the first quarter 2014 financial year of Cisco (began on August 1) after passing of the corresponding approvals and procedures.

On October 29, 2013 Cisco announced that it completed process of acquisition private Whiptail companies, the company specializes in area of the high-performance scalable SSM solid state drives (solid state memory) simplifying infrastructure of DPCs and the virtualized environment and allowing to process more data for a smaller interval of time.

2015: Cisco closes DWH-business

On July 24, 2015 it became known that Cisco will contract business on release of solid-state storage systems which was created based on the purchased Whiptail company. Explaining the reasons of this step, the American IT giant noted the desire to be focused only on the perspective directions. The market of DWH was failure for Cisco because of problems of technical character.

According to The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) with reference to the statement of Cisco made on July 24, 2015 the company will stop release of a product line under the name of Invicta (this brand succeeded Whiptail) therefore the part of the state of vendor will be reduced. How many people are going to be dismissed in connection with abolition of DWH business, not specified.

Cisco underwent a failure in the market of DWH and closes business

Cisco says that failure from release of Invicta is connected with the strategy assuming focus of the company on the markets having the highest potential of growth.^[1]

WSJ reminds that Cisco decided to enter the market of disk storages, despite risk to complicate partner relations, proposing similar solutions. Especially it concerned EMC with which Cisco created VCE joint venture (Virtual Computing Environment) occupied with development of convergent infrastructure.

In February, 2015 John Chambers holding at that time Cisco post of the head said that cooperation with EMC remains strong in spite of the fact that several months prior to this EMC redeemed almost all share in VCE from Cisco.

Cisco used the solid-state systems of Invicta in the computing architecture of Unified Computing System (UCS) and also sometimes sold them to the clients as separate products. However in September, 2014 Cisco was forced to stop deliveries of devices of Invicta because of "the arisen questions to quality", reminds the CRN edition.^[2]

The representative of Cisco told WSJ that shipments of products of the line of Invicta were interrupted for several months for elimination of defects. The senior analyst of 451 Research Tim Stammers notes that it is about "technical issues".

According to the expert, after Whiptail purchase the Cisco company tried to dictate the terms different from those that were in the market of DWH, but this invention was "precipitate".

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