Mountain View, Calif., 13 Oct 2016
Pure Storage (NYSE: PSTG), the market's leading independent solid-state array vendor, today announced the company is expanding its FlashStack converged infrastructure solution with Cisco, which makes it easier for customers to deploy, expand and maintain FlashStack solutions. With thousands of deployments in over 30 countries around the world, this proven solution continues to see triple digit growth year over year.
As data centres modernise from cost centre to centre of innovation, complexity has been increased by a wider span of locations and vendors to support. In this new era, FlashStack has been gaining market momentum as a consolidation platform for diverse IT workloads.
"As organisations embrace digitisation, data centres must enable agile, highly secure and more efficient application delivery with rapid access to information," said Satinder Sethi, VP, Data Centre and Cloud Solutions, Cisco. "Achieving this goal will require new technologies and innovations to enable operational agility, deliver actionable insight and provide engaging experiences for customers and partners. Cisco is pleased to collaborate with Pure Storage to deliver FlashStack solutions that enable digital enterprise IT with an integrated high-performance data centre infrastructure solution."
Validated Designs for FlashStack
Featuring technology from Pure Storage, which Gartner has named a leader in solid-state arrays three years in a row, FlashStack combines 'best of breed' components for converged infrastructure which have been tested under many different scenarios.
Comprised of Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS) and Pure Storage FlashArray//m storage along with mission-critical and business-critical applications, FlashStack is a modular and scalable solution, which, in larger configurations, may also include Cisco Nexus and/or MDS Series Switches. The latest addition to the FlashStack family, the FlashStack Mini, bundles the new FlashArray//m10 with the Cisco UCS Mini compute and fabric interconnect hardware along with virtualisation software from VMware or Microsoft.
Pure Storage and Cisco have developed a Cisco Validated Design for FlashStack with VMware Horizon for Enterprise VDI deployments up to 5 000 seats.
With FlashStack, organisations can scale desktops quickly and linearly without performance degradation, and system latency remains low as virtual desktop numbers scale from hundreds to thousands. With support for VMware virtualisation software, FlashStack addresses several VDI use cases with Cisco Validated Designs and reference architectures from Pure Storage and VMware.
"To reduce costs across our eight data centres, we decided to deploy FlashStack with VDI," said John Henderson, Assistant Vice President, Texas Children's Hospital. "In our first phase roll-out to over 1 000 clinicians, not only did we achieve our financial goals, clinician adoption, satisfaction, and efficiency increased as well. Having the Cisco Validated Design in place provides us with additional confidence as we look to expand our solution in the next several months."
Modern furniture and accessories design company Room & Board initially planned to deploy only one workload - in this case SAP. As the IT team saw just how quickly its SAP performance issues vanished, Room & Board decided to add new workloads, including Citrix XenApp, Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint and more.
"The collaboration between Cisco and Pure Storage for FlashStack has allowed us to add capacity and capabilities to our environment we never envisioned," said Shawn O'Brien, Director of Infrastructure and Architecture for Room & Board. "We initially bought FlashStack only for our SAP workloads, but when our report time went from five-to-seven hours on average down to fewer than two, it became apparent FlashStack could positively impact many more complex workloads across our entire organization."
At Room & Board, key sales reports that used to take an hour each can now be completed in less than two minutes, while Citrix log-in times for hundreds of users was reduced by more than 60%. Knowing there is rigorous testing and development standing behind these solutions, IT organizations such as Room & Board can feel confident about adding new technologies to the mix to accelerate business-driven initiatives.
In addition, Pure Storage and Cisco have recently introduced a Cisco Validated Design on FlashStack Data Center for Oracle Database 12c with Oracle Real Application Clusters, tested in both 4-node and 8-node versions. Pure has also introduced a number of other FlashStack solutions covering key data centre workloads including Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange, SAP ERP, SAP HANA, SAP Lumira, VMware vSphere, Citrix XenDesktop, NVIDIA vGPU for graphically-intensive VDI, and more. FlashStack customers include cloud service providers, educational institutions, hospitals, governments and financial services leaders, all of which have deployed FlashStack to transform to all-flash infrastructure.
"Accelerating our clients' migration to the cloud is critical to Secure-24's continued success," said Scott McIsaac, CTO, Secure-24. "FlashStack's integrated architecture, built on industry-leading components from Pure Storage, Cisco, VMware, SAP, Citrix, and more, enables us to quickly deploy landscapes and meet the dynamic business needs of our clients."
In this always-on digital age, women's health Web site Lifescript.com appreciates the business and IT transformation that an all-flash data centre drives.
"FlashStack from Cisco and Pure is the disruptive technology we needed to change our entire data centre," said Jack Hogan, CTO, Lifescript. "In fact, after achieving 12x reduction in latency; 60% reduction in data centre footprint; and 3.5-to-1 data reduction in our first data centre, we've decided to expand this solution to our second data centre."
The company's new data centre, based on Pure Storage FlashStack, was up and running within a week while slashing collocation costs by $100 000 a year and latency by up to 95%.
One-Call Support for FlashStack
Enterprises and service providers can resolve complex data centre issues quickly with Cisco Solution Support for Critical Infrastructure, which frees up IT resources for more strategic business opportunities. Cisco Solution Support for Critical Infrastructure provides customers with an option to purchase a single service for hardware and software support for this flexible all-flash solution.
The Cisco Solution Support team delivers solution expertise and accountability for centralised issue management and resolution among Cisco and technology partner products within covered multivendor solutions.
Strengthening Relationship Between Pure Storage and Cisco
Pure and Cisco continue to collaborate on FlashStack go-to-market strategies, including support for their joint channel partner ecosystem, focused on business-critical applications and structured workloads for the FlashArray product line, and unstructured workloads, including containers and microservices, with FlashBlade.
"As data centres become more complex, enterprises and service providers need to simplify IT with converged solutions," said Michael Sotnick, Vice President, Global Channels and Alliances, Pure Storage. "FlashStack enables IT organisations to work with top partners like Cisco and Pure Storage through our mutual channel to achieve tangible, lasting business transformation they never thought possible."
* Joint Customers: Pure Storage solutions (including FlashStack CI) with Cisco have expanded to thousands of deployments across more than 30 countries and a wide range of industries, including financial services, healthcare, education and service providers.
* Cisco Solution Incentive Program (SIP): FlashStack CI is now a qualified solution under the Cisco Solution Incentive Program, which is designed to encourage Cisco technology and channel partners to collaboratively develop, market, and deliver industry solutions that create successful business outcomes.
* Cisco Capital Agreement: Cisco and Pure Storage have recently signed a teaming agreement designed to accelerate FlashStack, FlashArray and FlashBlade business through Cisco Capital's worldwide lease base, Master Licensing Agreements and relationships with financial leads in key accounts.
* Cisco UCS 3.0 Certification: Pure has been certified on Cisco UCS 3.0, the latest Cisco UCS Manager release and the main release for the Cisco UCS Mini, and is working towards completing other testing requirements for Cisco MDS, UCS and Nexus compatibility, including Nexus 9000 switches.
* Cisco UCS Director Integration: Cisco UCS Director provides a data center orchestration platform to monitor, plan and execute infrastructure management tasks on joint Cisco and Pure deployments, including FlashStack Converged Infrastructure. With built-in workflows for Pure Storage FlashArray, Cisco Nexus switches, Cisco UCS compute and VMware vSphere, Cisco UCS Director allows IT to shift time and focus from infrastructure management to delivering new service innovation.
* Cisco DCNM integration: Pure Storage arrays also have SMI-S capability, which enables the arrays to be visualized in the Cisco Prime Data Center Network Management (DCNM) tool for ease of optimisation and troubleshooting.
These integration proof points between Cisco and Pure Storage provide stability to channel partners, alliance ecosystem, and customers.
Cisco Validated Designs for FlashStack
* FlashStack with Cisco UCS and Pure Storage FlashArray//m for 5000 VMware Horizon View 6.2 Users
* FlashStack Data Centre with Oracle Database 12c on Oracle Linux
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