Word began quickly circulating this week that Cisco has halted shipments of their UCS Invicta all flash arrays. Cisco picked up the Invicta technology from Whiptail for $415 million a year ago, but hasn't been outwardly communicative about their plans for the AFAs. Apparently now multiple customers are complaining of quality issues relating to scalability of the arrays. For their part Cisco paused sales of the product and is furiously working to address the issues, with plans to start shipping again in October, presumably after a new OS turn is made available to their customers.
Word began quickly circulating this week that Cisco has halted shipments of their UCS Invicta all flash arrays. Cisco picked up the Invicta technology from Whiptail for $415 million a year ago, but hasn't been outwardly communicative about their plans for the AFAs. Apparently now multiple customers are complaining of quality issues relating to scalability of the arrays. For their part Cisco paused sales of the product and is furiously working to address the issues, with plans to start shipping again in October, presumably after a new OS turn is made available to their customers.
Cisco's full statement on the matter reads as such:
We are seeing tremendous demand for Invicta from within our UCS installed base, but as we ramped up volumes, we found that a small number of customers were experiencing quality issues in deployments. Our customers expect the same quality, simplicity and customer experience from Invicta as they've become accustomed to with other Cisco products, so we decided to put a temporary hold on shipments while we address those deployment and experience issues We expect to resume shipments later this fiscal quarter (Aug-Oct).
How small the numbers are of those with troubles remains to be seen, but regardless of the number of uses effected, the response is pretty vocal with Cisco partners trying to figure out what to do. It seems this issue has also been occurring for some time as CRN reports. "Cisco reps definitely aren't working Invicta into UCS-related conversations as much as they used to, one partner told CRN. 'Three or four months ago, every UCS conversation with Cisco would have something to do with Invicta. Now, we are not seeing that as much,' said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity."
The AFA storage segment is growing faster than ever, it certainly makes sense that Cisco wants to be there, with fully integrated solutions including compute, storage and networking, all under the Cisco banner. AFAs have the potential to open up new opportunities for networking and compute, as storage latencies tumble and more data-intensive workloads emerge, new pressures get applied to the compute and networking architecture. At least Cisco appears to be handling customers well, with not just promise of a solution coming, but acceptance that there is a problem in the first place. Crisis management is often key for these situations, as at times they can spiral out of control the other way as in the lawsuit involving fellow AFA vendor Nimbus Data.
