Cisco announced this morning that it’s bolstering its UCS server platform with the acquisition of Whiptail, a privately-held provider of all-flash storage arrays. The $415 million deal is expected to be completed in the first quarter of fiscal year 2014.

Founded in 2009, Whiptail addresses the high cost of flash with rackmount storage systems that leverage multi-level cell (MLC) memory instead of the more expensive single-level cell (SLC) variant. MLC is not as fast or reliable as SLC, but Whiptail says that its software brings it up to par. The company’s arrays run on Racerunner, a homegrown operating system that reduces latency while increasing the performance and the longevity of the underlying hardware.

Hilton Romanski, the vice president of corporate development at Cisco, touted in a blog post that Whiptail’s arrays can deliver over four million IOPS and 360 terabytes of raw capacity. He revealed that Cisco plans to integrate the firm’s technology with its management software to make UCS more viable for cloud and Big Data workloads.

Wikibon Senior Analyst Stu Miniman commented that “even before the acquisition, Cisco’s UCS solutions offered server-based flash – from EMC, Fusion-io and others. Cisco has done an excellent job at growing UCS to the #2 position in the bladeserver market (still low single digit market share in the overall server market). Not having an in-house flash solution would soon become a limit to Cisco’s growth.”

The acquisition of Whiptail will improve Cisco’s market position, but not without adding further tension to its already strained relationship with EMC. Last year, the storage titan’s majority-owned subsidiary VMware shelled out $1.2 billion for a software-defined networking startup called Nicira.

Whiptail will also impact VCE, a joint venture that hinges between Cisco, EMC and VMware that sells a converged infrastructure solution called Vblock. Like NetApp’s rivaling FlexPod line, Vblock ships with Cisco hardware.