After making strategic investments in "advanced technology" areas such as security, storage, wireless LANs (including companies such as Aironet and Airespace), enterprise VoIP, Optical (SONET), and home networking (including companies such as Linksys), you can tack on the newest addition to the list: clustered servers.  Cisco (Nasdaq:CSCO) announced yesterday the acquisition of Topspin for $250 million. 

The Mountain View (CA) company is a provider of so-called server fabric switches, which are designed to connect interconnect servers in a clustered environment and also deliver network and storage connectivity to that server cluster.  Topspin was founded in April 2000, has about 135 employees in Mountain View and Bangalore, India, and will join Cisco's Data Center, Switching and Wireless Technology Group. 

The raison d'etre of this acquisition is the increasing popularity of the clustered server approach.  The idea is to pool IT resources into a single virtual machine that monitors system demand and accordingly tweaks the supply.  Moreover, Topspin may complement Cisco's Ethernet and SAN switches, making Cisco a top player (#1 or #2) in the SAN switch market.  Another Topspin intangible is its relationships with companies such as Dell, HP, IBM, NEC and Sun, all current Topspin partners.