The Internet of Everything is delivering profound changes to the world. By 2017 there will be more than 19 billion networked devices globally -bringing a deluge of data on today's IT environments. Against this backdrop, we are witnessing a move from the Web Economy of the early 2000s to the App Economy of today, and with this transformation, data center architectures are evolving from the Web 2.0 tiered architectures of the past to the Application-Centric Infrastructure of tomorrow. As the importance of the application grows, so does the need for high performance systems to be optimized to support emerging and business critical workloads.

Cisco is evolving UCS to keep pace with the changes brought about by the Internet of Everything and the App Economy.  Today, Cisco is announcing its intent to acquire WHIPTAIL. Based in Whippany, New Jersey, WHIPTAIL builds the highest performing and most scalable solid-state memory systems available today. Scalable from one node to up to 30 nodes, WHIPTAIL systems can deliver over four million IOPS and 360 Terabytes of raw capacity -a truly staggering amount of solid-state performance capable of providing the workload optimization required in the App Economy.

By making this acquisition, Cisco is enhancing the Unified Computing System (UCS) by bringing solid-state memory acceleration into the compute tier as a managed subsystem.  WHIPTAIL is a perfect architectural fit for UCS because together the two combine a clustered architecture with fabric-based acceleration -all of which is automatable via the UCS Manager and UCS Director. The end result is to deliver optimized performance on top of UCS for emerging and business critical applications, such as virtualized, Big Data, database, High Performance Computing and transcoding workloads.

Since its introduction in 2009, Cisco UCS has grown to become the leading fabric computing system and the number two x86 blade server platform worldwide.  By converging compute onto the fabric through what is widely recognized as a truly innovative server architecture, UCS has been able to capture 73 world record application performance benchmarks and achieve one of the highest growth rates of any product platform in history.  And by bringing solid-state performance into the compute tier, WHIPTAIL speeds a natural evolution of the fabric computing domain and drastically improves performance for customers' current business-critical application environments.

We couldn't be more excited about the opportunity to continue driving UCS leadership with the addition of WHIPTAIL.  Stay tuned for more details in the weeks and months to come.  And welcome WHIPTAIL!