Cisco Drops Invicta All-Flash Storage Arrays

Cisco announced on Friday that it's halting production of its Invicta all-flash storage product line, giving up on the storage business it acquired in 2013.

"Cisco is prioritizing the elements of our portfolio to drive the most value for our customers both now and in the future, and today we are announcing the End of Life (EoL) for the Invicta Appliance and Scaling System products," the company said in an email statement. Cisco will continue to support existing customers who have deployed Invicta products.

Cisco made a big splash when it moved to acquire all-solid-state array vendor Whiptail for $415 million about two years ago. In a blog post at the time, Deepstorage Chief Scientist and Network Computing Contributor Howard Marks wrote that the storage deal put Cisco one step closer to becoming a one-stop IT shop.

In January 2014, Cisco launched its Invicta all-flash product line as part of its Unified Computing System (UCS) platform. But last September, Cisco reportedly halted shipments of Invicta, citing quality issues. According to CRN, the company restarted shipments in April. Whiptail's former CEO, who had joined Cisco with the acquisition, reportedly left the company in March.

Jim O'Reilly, a storage expert and Network Computing contributor, said Cisco probably couldn't figure out how to include Whiptail's technology into its product line without running into EMC's all-flash storage arrays.

By the time Cisco got out of its partnership with EMC in VCE, "Whiptail was in a terminal dive," he said. Last fall, the joint VCE converged infrastructure venture between Cisco, EMC and VMware became an EMC-only business.

The Invicta EoL may not be the end of Cisco's storage aspirations, though. There have been rumors that it might buy hyperconvergence vendor Nutanix.

In its statement on Friday, Cisco said it would continue to invest in building data center products via "UCS product innovations, and market-leading flash storage solutions from our partner ecosystem."