Cisco announced intent to acquire privately held Whiptail, vendor of high-performance scalable solid state memory systems, for about US$415m in cash and retention-based incentives.

Cisco hopes the Whippany, New Jersey-based company will strengthen its Unified Computing System (UCS) strategy and enhance application performance by integrating scalable solid state memory into the UCS's fabric computing architecture.

The networking giant is evolving the UCS architecture by integrating data acceleration capability into the compute layer. Integrating Whiptail's memory systems with UCS at a hardware and manageability level will simplify customers' data center environments by delivering the required performance in a fraction of the data center floor space with unified management for provisioning and administration, according to Cisco.

Paul Perez, VP and general manager of Cisco's Computing Systems Product Group, said, “We are focused on providing a converged infrastructure including compute, network and high performance solid state that will help address our customers' requirements for next-generation computing environments. As we continue to innovate our unified platform, Whiptail will help realize our vision of scalable persistent memory which is integrated into the server, available as a fabric resource and managed as a globally shared pool.”

Upon completion of the acquisition, Whiptail employees will be integrated into the Computing Systems Product Group. The acquisition is expected to be complete in the first quarter of fiscal year 2014.