Cisco announced its entry into the hot enterprise flash storage market today, unveiling the UCS Invicta all-flash storage appliance. The product is the first result of the vendor's US$415m acquisition of Whiptail, a New Jersey-based solid-state memory company.

The plan, from the beginning, was to integrate a flash storage appliance into Cisco's converged infrastructure solution called Unified Computing System, which until now consisted of servers, networking switches and a virtualization platform.

A single Evicta node provides up to 24 terabytes of storage capacity in the highest-performance mode and up to 64TB in lower-performing state. It offers 250,000 IOPS and 1.9Gbps of bandwidth.

This is strictly a UCS play for Cisco. Maxwell Riggsbee, director of product management for Invicta, said the appliance was not compatible with non-UCS environments and there were no plans to make it so in the future.

All-flash enterprise storage is a growing market with many players. They include giants like NetApp, EMC, HP and Dell, as well as startups, such as Violin and Coho, among others.

Flash is popular for its high performance and the market is growing because the medium is gradually getting cheaper, while modern applications require better and better performance from the storage array.

Cisco is pitching UCS Invicta for analytics, batch processing, email, online transaction processing, video, virtual desktop, database and high performance computing applications.

The system has deduplication and multi-tenant capabilities.

In addition to announcing Invicta, Cisco rolled out three new data center switches, a network virtualization solution for OpenStack environments and the latest release of UCS Director, its IT infrastructure management software.

Here are some details on the new switches:

Nexus 7706 switch and a high-density F3 Series 1/10G module for Nexus 7700 switches for wider deployment options for data center interconnect, core or aggregation based on their specific networking requirements

Nexus 5672UP and 56128P switches: The new Nexus 5600 family offers VXLAN bridging and routing capability, line rate L2 and L3 and 40G uplinks; compact form factor for 10G top-of-rack switch; 1/10G FEX aggregation deployments for traditional, virtualized and cloud environments

Nexus 3172TQ top of rack 1RU provides 1/10G BaseT (copper) server access

The network virtualization solution is called Nexus 1000V. Running on the KVM hypervisor, it enables network virtualization for OpenStack that can be deployed consistently across VMware, Microsoft and Linux-based platforms.

New features in the latest version of UCS Director include support for UCS-based converged infrastructure solutions such Cisco and NetApp's FlexPod and VCE's Vblock, as well as EMC's VSPEX, VMAX and VNX2.

Naturally, the release supports Invicta, but also features deeper support for NetApp and EMC storage.