Cisco has announced that it will acquire Whiptail, a solid state memory system company, for $415 million. Cisco plans to integrate Whiptail’s solid state memory technology into its unified computing system (UCS) products.

Under the terms of the deal, Cisco pays $415 million in cash and retention-based incentives for Whiptail. The deal is expected to close in Cisco’s first quarter. Cisco’s acquisition highlights the run on solid-state storage companies. On Monday, Western Digital scooped up Virident for $685 million.

According to Cisco, Whiptail will boost performance in UCS by speeding applications. Cisco plans to integrate data acceleration technologies into its compute layer. Whiptail employees will be integrated into Cisco’s computing systems group.

In a blog post, Cisco said:

Whiptail is a perfect architectural fit for UCS because together the two combine a clustered architecture with fabric-based acceleration – all of which is automatable via the UCS Manager and UCS Director. The end result is to deliver optimized performance on top of UCS for emerging and business critical applications, such as virtualized, Big Data, database, High Performance Computing and transcoding workloads.

Whiptail has a series of systems—Accela, Invicta and Invicta Infinity—and an operating system called Racerunner.