Back on September 10th, Cisco announced the intent to acquire WHIPTAIL and today I’m excited to report to our Data Center blog readers that the acquisition has been completed!
Paul Perez has laid out Cisco’s vision for this technology and the crucial role that solid-state memory plays in the next evolution of UCS. If you haven’t already seen his post, it’s well worth a read to understand where we’re heading with this. As he points out in an earlier treatise on UCS, adaptability is the wellspring of sustained advantage. The integration of WHIPTAIL’s innovative application acceleration technology into the computing fabric of UCS is a perfect example of this principle at work; all made possible by an architecture founded on the concept of a unified control plane with an open API.
So what are we adapting to by adding this technology to UCS?
- Customers need applications to run faster
- They need IT infrastructure to be reliable, efficient, and above all, easy to operate
The first one is (almost) the easy part: it’s common knowledge that solid-state memory moves faster than a scalded ape*. Rolling that kind of energy into the environment in a way that avoids complexity and preserves operational efficiency is what elevates value to customers.
I’ve had the pleasure of starting work with Max Riggsbee, and he related to me that a large part of WHIPTAIL’s success is rooted in manageability. I’m paraphrasing here, but the essence of his comment was “customers don’t want a variety of technologies in the data center, they want a variety of capabilities.” In their architecture, you can see how WHIPTAIL understands that customers want to be able to manage application acceleration technology, on the fly, to create the right blend of speed, capacity and cost efficiency to meet the needs of the business in real time. The ability to marshal infrastructure and data, in a way that empowers real time decision-making creates competitive advantage.
If that concept, one of centrally managing high performance resources as fungible pools that can be allocated in an application-centric way, sounds familiar, you now understand what a great addition WHIPTAIL technology makes to Unified Computing. By deeply integrating an application acceleration tier into a unified system we can achieve both of the requirements above and set our customers up do things we haven’t even imagined yet. I
t’s like getting the trick and the treat this Thursday.
Dan Crain expands on this in a video interview today, marking the close of the acquisition and what is yet to come. The Data Center team here at Cisco is really excited about what this is going to mean for our customers and how it contributes to our pace of innovation. Welcome WHIPTAIL!!
*no apes were harmed in the writing of this blog
Interesting.. what could be some of the use cases?
SAP Hana, Cognos, Hyperion, MSBI, etc. would be a perfect use cases. In fact all applications are slowly moving to in memory computing to leverage this revolutionizing technology. Shared flash memory across compute with throughput of up to 160gb network connectivity per blade and centralized management is leading to optimal data center consolidations and amazingly faster deployments.