When Cisco System Inc., entered the fragmented storage ecosystem, it made partnerships across the board. But Cisco’s partnership with Pure Storage Inc., has been a particularly strong one, highlighted by Pure Storage’s converged infrastructure stack product FlashStack. So what’s new for the partnership?

Patrick Smith (pictured, left), field chief technology officer for EMEA at Pure Storage, and Eric Greffier (pictured, right), managing director of EMEAR Specialists at Cisco Systems, spoke with Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Cisco Live event in Barcelona. They discussed the partnership between Cisco and Pure Storage, where it’s been, and where it’s going. (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following has been condensed for clarity.]

Miniman: Patrick, give us the update here [in ] 2020. What’s … interesting and important to know about the Pure Storage and Cisco customer base?

Smith: We … continue to see significant adoption of FlashStack, our converged infrastructure with Cisco, driving just great interest and great growth both for Pure and for Cisco with the UCS platform and the value that the customers see in FlashStack, bringing together storage, networking and compute together with overall automation of the stack. And that really gives customers fantastic time to value, and that’s what they’re looking for in this day and age.

Miniman: Eric, what differentiates the partnership with Pure versus … many of the storage companies out there?

Greffier: I think the key element for us is really to have those CVDs — those Cisco Validated Designs together. And FlashStack was a great addition to our existing partnership at that time … a couple of years ago. And, of course, with the flash technology of Pure, we’ve seen the demand … going and going, and it has been amazing … trajectory together.

Furrier: Talk more about the CVDs and the different use cases you’re seeing.

Greffier: It’s Cisco Validated Design. This is kind of an outcome in the form of a document … available for customers and partners, which is the outcome of the partnership from R&D to R&D. Which is just telling customers and partners what they need to order and how they need to fit all of this together for a specific business outcome. And the reason why we have multiple CVDs is we have one CVD per use case. So the more use cases we have together, the more the CVD is precise and you just have to follow the CVD design principles.

Furrier: You guys were first … in bringing AI and storage together. 

Smith: The FlashBlade … was our move into building a storage platform for AI and modern analytics. And we’ve seen tremendous success with that … in lots of different verticals. And so with Cisco, we launched FlashStack for AI, which brings together FlashBlade networking and Cisco’s is a fantastic compute platform with capability for considerable scale of Nvidia GPU.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Cisco Live event. (* Disclosure:Pure Storage Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Pure Storage nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE