Global IT leader Cisco announced that it would be buying Whiptail for USD 415 million in cash. The terms of the agreement also stipulated that Cisco would give retention-based incentives to the privately-held company in exchange for all its shares.The deal is set for completion in the first quarter of the fiscal year next year.

A storage software firm, Whiptail's capital funding came from Spring Mountain Capital, RRE Ventures and Ignition Partners. In a press release, Cisco said the acquisition of Whiptail would enhance the IT leader's Unified Computing System (UCS) program. Through the integration of scalable solid state memory into the computing architecture fabric of UCS, Cisco added that Whiptail would be able to increase the performance of the application.

Cisco Computing Systems Product Group Vice President and General Manager Paul Perez said, "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."