The green salamander is out: Cisco gives up on Invicta flash arrays That’s that then: it was a $415m mistake. We have heard from several sources that Cisco has laid off virtually the entire Invicta all-flash array engineering and development team. If true, Cisco – still led by John Chambers – has admitted the 2013 Whiptail acquisition was a complete cock-up. Timing-wise, this has happened at …
...why, for the love of Jibbers, why?
Buy Tintri. Or Pure. Actually, do they have enough money for Pure?
Fuck it. Buy SimpliVity. They're already close buddies anyways. At least then they'd be buying the future (hyperconvergence) instead of the past (arrays). Besides, Cisco's customers don't mind proprietary bits, so the accelerator card shouldn't bother them.
that cisco was aimed to purchase another storage company, I'd be retired. Fact remains, they have no real reason to do so. They have partnered with every storage vendor under the sun to sell higher margin products and in turn not piss off the masses. Invicta was a failure purchase, but in the grand scheme of things a fairly cheap mistake compared to some others. Consider this a failure of the previous management team who appear to have all left recently.
Such a shame if this is true. I still think invicta on a blade in a UCS Chassis could have been quite a powerhouse.
Nutanix would make sense. Cisco have the hardware, Nutanix have the software, put it on 3100 series or what ever its called (Never really sell them) and you've got a decent hyperconverged setup. Better yet stuff if on 8 blades in a UCS Mini and you've got a monster. Using a UCS mini they could call it super-hyper-converged.... Or something similarly daft anyway. That'd be a monster setup!
I've downloaded the community version of Nutanix but still not testied it on a UCS Blade. The new Demo UCS Mini and Nimble CS215 should be here in the next few weeks so as soon as I've got a few deployments out of the way its play time!! I'll be playing with Nutanix first!
What really is a shame is how Cisco treated the entire acquisition. If you thought they looked confused on positioning from the outside, you can only imagine what was going on inside the company. Half of senior management was outright hostile to the idea of having in-house storage arrays, couple that with being in the middle of a big LR and you have the perfect storm where the non-supporters can strangle the headcount budget.
If you strangle headcount growth in a recently acquired startup and expect to be able to transition existing products to new platforms as well as continue develop cutting edge features while simultaneously raising the bar for testing and interoperability, its very easy to predict the result. Which in turn allows the original dissenters to declare failure.
In the end, from a bigger picture perspective it looks like Cisco doesnt really want to be in the array business and is likely to do something they understand better (and this is a good thing) like hyperconverged. This will allow them to leverage their considerable strength in compute while minimizing their risk, and should provide them with a better return.
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