Cisco Confirms It Is Ending Its Invicta Storage Appliance

According to both The Register and CRN, Cisco has confirmed that will cease its Invicta Storage Array line. Cisco first acquired the Invicta All-Flash array when it purchased Whiptail in 2013 for $415 million. Within a year Cisco halted shipments from apparent customer complaints. After two years of issues, Cisco will no longer develop the Invicta Appliance and its Scaling Systems products.

According to both The Register and CRN, Cisco has confirmed that will cease its Invicta Storage Array line. Cisco first acquired the Invicta All-Flash array when it purchased Whiptail in 2013 for $415 million. Within a year Cisco halted shipments from apparent customer complaints. After two years of issues, Cisco will no longer develop the Invicta Appliance and its Scaling Systems products.

According to a Cisco spokesperson, “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. We will continue to support existing customers who have deployed Invicta products in accordance with our Products and Services End of Life Policy, which includes ongoing technical assistance, software support and spare/replacement parts.” Cisco also intends to stay focused on its Unified Computing System as the spokesperson further stated, “UCS delivers on customers’ compute and network needs, and we will continue to invest in building world-class data center solutions via UCS product innovations, and market-leading flash storage solutions from our Partner ecosystem.”

When Cisco first acquired Whiptail, they were moving into the converged infrastructure market and appeared as though they were attempting to compete with EMC’s VSPEX and VCE Vblocks. In turn, EMC bought out most of Cisco’s stake in VCE and made it part of EMC’s federation.

Cisco began to ship Invicta AFA after is acquired Whiptail, but shortly after it began it halted shipments for “quality issues in deployments.” In March of this year Cisco stated it was prepared to once again begin shipping its Invicta line however it did not return to the market. Now after two years of problems and half a billion dollars spent, Cisco is discontinuing the Invicta line. However Cisco still owns Whiptail and its flash storage technology. And Cisco has multiple paths it could take the technology down.

Cisco main site

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