Cisco this week completed its acquisition of spin-in Insieme Networks, the developer of Cisco's Nexus 9000 data center switching line and Application Centric Infrastructure fabric. Cisco said it could pay up to $863 million for Insieme, which launched its products Nov. 6, based on revenue achieved from the sale of Insieme products.
The payout will not be made until Cisco's 2016 and 2017 fiscal years.
[ENVY? Cisco competitors say Nexus 9000 brings closed hardware to an open software game]
Meanwhile, Cisco's readying the next generation of its Unified Computing System servers. UCS 2.0 will be optimized for data intensive applications, big data analytics, decentralization and service provider clouds, says Paul Perez, vice president and chief technology officer in Cisco's data center group.
Perez spoke at this week's Raymond James Systems, Semiconductors, Software & Supply Chain Conference. A transcript can be found here on the Seeking Alpha site.
Perez also shed a little bit of light on where Cisco's WHIPTAIL solid state flash memory acquisition fits in to the UCS picture: not only in converged IT infrastructure, where compute, storage and networking fabrics come together, but also in application and data acceleration.
...there's a need to partly integrate application acceleration to data acceleration with solid-state into compute environments. So we think of it as, there's a structural change happening in the market where there are cases that historically have been more identified with the storage domain and those were moving more towards the compute environment, and we have to make our strategic choices whether we wanted to own it or not...
Perez also addressed the impact this may have on the VCE joint venture Cisco has with storage titan EMC and its VMware virtualization subsidiary. He said Cisco's had recent talks with VCE and EMC management and they understand the "structural change" happening. Cisco invited VCE to use UCS and WHIPTAIL in addition to EMC's flash offering, XtremIO, in its Vblock integrated infrastructure products.
Perez says Cisco's also briefed storage partner NetApp on its plan to offer a "playbook" of solid-state storage "happy meals" for joint reference architectures: FlexPod with NetApp, and VSPEC with EMC. Said Perez:
...I think they feel comfortable that we are not getting into storage and that we will continue to be with partners...
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