With Cisco's $450 Million Buy Of Whiptail, Flash Startups Grabbed $1 Billion+ This Week (CSCO)

It isn't surprising that Cisco would want to own its own flash storage tech. Cisco makes a popular data center server known as the Unified Compute System (UCS). UCS combines servers with networking, storage and "virtualization" software that allows many operating systems to run on it.

But Cisco has been struggling with its biggest partners for UCS, storage giant EMC and its subsidiary VMware. VMware is trying to eat Cisco's lunch by selling a disruptive new technology called Software Defined Networks (SDN). SDN lets enterprises buy less network equipment use less expensive models, too.

Cisco has been trying to distance itself from VMware and EMC without cratering the success of UCS. For instance, earlier this year, it also invested in VMware competitor Parallels.

Meanwhile, this acquisition has added fire to an already super hot flash storage market.

Look at all these deals in the past few weeks, including two big acquisitions, worth $1.1 billion, this week alone:

Cisco buys Whiptail for $415 million (Tuesday)