UPDATED 00:09 EDT / OCTOBER 14 2016

NEWS

Pure Storage expands converged infrastructure partnership with Cisco

All-flash storage solutions provider Pure Storage Inc. is expanding its partnership on converged infrastructure with Cisco Systems Inc. The company said that Cisco has validated its FlashStack converged infrastructure systems for the data center.

The collaboration between the two companies is particularly interesting in light of the recent merger between Dell Inc. and EMC Corp. to form Dell Technologies Inc., which gave birth to the Dell EMC enterprise technology brand. The main reason is because Cisco and EMC had previously partnered on the VCE converged infrastructure venture along with VMware Inc., which was also swallowed by Dell. Officially, Cisco is still a partner of Dell EMC’s, but it’s likely that the compute bits of the new brand’s converged systems will now run on Dell servers.

As such, Cisco’s partnerships with smaller vendors like Pure Storage and NetApp Inc. will become even more critical to the company. As for Pure Storage, the obvious benefit is it will gain more sales to larger enterprises looking to move to solid-state infrastructure. Pure Storage also gains hefty backing in the form of Cisco as it looks to rival Dell EMC.

Pure Storage’s FlashStack combines its own all-flash arrays with Cisco’s Unified Computing System, giving the partners a converged platform offering suitable for a wide variety of IT workloads. The latest version packages the lower-end version of Pure Storage’s FlashArray//m with Cisco’s fabric interconnect hardware, and also virtualization software from VMware Inc. or Microsoft, the partners said. In larger configurations, the system may also include Cisco Nexus and/or MDS Series Switches. The new FlashStack collaboration targets data center workloads on Oracle’s Database 12c, Microsoft SQL Server and Exchange, Nvidia vGPU, SAP HANA and VMware vSphere, the companies added.

Pure Storage said it and Cisco have developed a Cisco Validated Design for FlashStack with VMware Horizon for Enterprise VDI deployments up to 5,000 seats.

Lifescript.com, the popular woman’s health website, said it’s already deployed an all-flash data center based on Flashstack.

“FlashStack from Cisco and Pure is the disruptive technology we needed to change our entire data centre,” said Jack Hogan, CTO, Lifescript, in a statement. “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.”

Lifescript said it managed to get its new data center based on FlashStack up and running within just one week, while cutting its colocation costs by $100,000 a year, and reducing latency by up to 95 percent.

In addition, Pure Storage and Cisco are now offering “one-call support” to joint customers, with Cisco’s Solution Support for Critical Infrastructure service now covering any Pure deployments as well. The two partners are also planning to build out channel support, increase leasing and incentive options, and create new marketing strategies for FlashStack.

Satinder Sethi, vice president of data center and cloud solutions at Cisco, said the companies end goal was to provide data centers that enable “agile, highly secure and more efficient application delivery with rapid access to information”.

“Achieving this goal will require new technologies and innovations to enable operational agility, deliver actionable insight and provide engaging experiences for customers and partners,” Sethi continued. “Cisco is pleased to collaborate with Pure Storage to deliver FlashStack solutions that enable digital enterprise IT with an integrated high-performance data center infrastructure solution.”


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