Pure Storage is expanding its FlashStack Converged Infrastructure Solution with Cisco.

The company said it makes it easier for customers to deploy, expand and maintain FlashStack solutions which it said saw triple digit growth year over year.

Pure says data centers are moving from cost center to center of innovation adding complexity by a wider span of locations and vendors to support.

“As organizations embrace digitization, data centers must enable agile, highly secure and more efficient application delivery with rapid access to information,” said Satinder Sethi, VP, Data Center and Cloud Solutions, Cisco.

The FlashStack is comprised of Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS) and Pure Storage FlashArray//m storage along with mission-critical and business-critical applications.

Flashstack Mini
Flashstack Mini

In larger configurations it 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 virtualization 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.

Pure and Cisco recently launched 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 solutions covering Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange, SAP ERP, SAP HANA, SAP Lumira, VMware vSphere, Citrix XenDesktop, and NVIDIA vGPU for graphically-intensive VDI.

Women’s health website Lifscript.com deployed an all flash data centre. “FlashStack from Cisco and Pure is the disruptive technology we needed to change our entire data centre,” said Jack Hogan, CTO, Liftscript. “In fact, after achieving 12x reduction in latency; 60 percent reduction in data center footprint; and 3.5-to-1 data reduction in our first data center, we’ve decided to expand this solution to our second data center.”

The company’s new data center, 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 percent.

“To reduce costs across our eight data centers, 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.”

pure-ucs-fa400-detailed-eth-fc-config-take2“As data centers 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.

Separately Pure announced petabyte-scale storage for mission-critical cloud IT with the  FlashArray//m with a measured 99.9999 percent availability and always-on Quality of Service which it said ‘virtually eliminates storage downtime and application performance risk.’

“Storage underlies everything we do in today’s digital economy, an economy that is increasingly powered by cloud IT,” said Matt Kixmoeller, VP of Product, Pure Storage. “Pure Storage has built the smart storage platform to deliver cloud IT – whether it be public cloud, SaaS, private cloud, or a mix of all three.  Efficient all-flash storage, now at petabyte-scale, is the agile foundation of tomorrow’s clouds.”