Pure Storage: Continued Momentum of Joint flashStack Solutions and Customer Transformation With Cisco

Pure Storage, Inc. announced an enhanced flashStack offering, the company’s next-generation data center platform solution with Cisco Technology, Inc.

These enhancements include Cisco Validated Designs with Citrix, Commvault Systems, Inc., SAP SE, and VMware, Inc. to provide more options for customers seeking flexible growth and streamlined operations from their infrastructure platform.

The flashStack solution combines the latest in compute, network, and storage hardware into a single, integrated architecture that speeds time to deployment, lowers overall IT costs, and reduces deployment risk. The solution comprised of Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) and Pure Storage, is a modular and scalable platform. The two companies’s customers choose flashStack to transform not only IT infrastructure, but also their organisations.

flashStack delivers experience that accelerates applications,
saving customers time and money:
For flashStack customer CCI in Australia, flashStack has eliminated any storage maintenance burden. CCI has gone from requiring two internal staff plus an external professional services team for maintenance to zero management overhead.

Tony Lawrence, information security officer, said this equates to saving one whole month out of the year on storage administration. Since deploying flashStack, CCI has gone from spending 16 hours on systems backups to two hours. The speed and efficiency with which processes are now completed also allows CCI to achieve data reduction rates of 3.7:1 and 3.0:1 respectively on each of their two flashStack configurations. Systems running faster to which translates into business value for CCI’s clients: experience on customer portals, insurance systems and quicker database transactions.

“With flashStack from Cisco and Pure Storage, the physical management of storage is much simpler. No one needs to touch it, which translates into tangible savings for our organisation. You know it’s an amazing product when you install it and forget it’s even there,” said Lawrence. “Everything runs quicker, and we’re able to process data ten times faster to help our customers make better decisions.“

As Western Australia’s largest aged care not-for-profit organisation, The Bethanie Group Inc. provides quality services to 4,600 patients across the state. To deliver on its promise to care for patients as family, it relies on 24/7 up time for its mobile staff as well as fast access to large volumes of patient data.

“We are one of the largest not-for-profit organisations providing aged-care services in Western Australia, and we made the move to flashStack because we needed a flexible solution that we could implement quickly, so converged infrastructure was the best option for our environment,” said Mark Balding, GM, ICT, Bethanie. “It was the right technology in terms of performance and efficiency plus it was the right price for us. As a not-for-profit, we want to invest our money in the services and experience we are providing our customers, and the cost savings we get with Pure will be vital to our business over the next three to five years.“

KordaMentha Pty Ltd. is an advisory and investment firm that provides turnaround and restructuring, real estate and forensic support for companies and their stakeholders. Established in 2002, it has grown from a heritage in insolvency to one of Australia’s foremost multidisciplinary advisory firms; assisting clients in a variety of complex commercial matters.

“As a rapidly growing advisory firm, we couldn’t let our storage hold us back. We needed a solution that could handle all of our workloads from analytics reporting to remote desktop services and without any latency,” said Ryan Wadsworth, director, technology, KordaMentha. “With flashStack, we are always up and running and it was so simple that once we plugged it in, it was ready to operate within 15 minutes. On top of this, the Pure maintenance model is ground-breaking: the technology stays fresh, gets newer, faster, more dense, and costs us less over time.“

According to research by ESG, almost 90% of IT managers surveyed are already using or plan to adopt converged infrastructure technology solutions systems into their environments.

“While there are many reasons for this traction, one big driver is that IT organisations are looking to attain from their on-premises infrastructures the same levels of speed, agility, and simplicity of management that they can get from the cloud,” says Terri McClure, senior analyst, ESG. “Platforms like flashStack offer advantages due to native all-flash storage, and can provide performance, ease of use and simple, hands-off management at scale. As data needs grow, managing many small appliances can be challenging and create networking challenges. Consolidating workloads on converged systems makes sense from a manageability, scalability, performance and networking standpoint.“

“Organisations want to be able to deploy a private cloud seamlessly and without any disruptions; flashStack allows them to do this while increasing performance and reducing overall IT costs,” said Michael Alp, VP, AsiaPac Japan, Pure Storage. “We are always working to strengthen our relationships and integrations with technology partners to directly benefit our customers and channel partners. Our collaboration with Cisco, Citrix, Commvault and SAP through the Cisco Validated Design program enables us to deliver the effortless, efficient and reliable experience our customers deserve.“

“Increasing numbers of enterprise customers are delivering mission-critical workloads and empowering their users by deploying Cisco validated flashStack solutions,” said Rodney Hamill, director, data centre, Australia and New Zealand, Cisco. “Because flashStack allows organisations to upgrade capacity without downtime and deploy cloudlike capabilities to help ensure constant data access, it frees up IT staff to innovate. By reducing the amount of time spent on infrastructure, IT teams can repurpose their time to better support business goals, create new services and revenue streams previously not thought possible.“

flashArray

Cisco Validated Designs
Pure Storage and Cisco have developed a Cisco Validated Design for flashStack with SAP HANA TDI to provide a solution that is agile, scalable and flexible for customers running their business applications on SAP. It also requires no storage tier planning or tuning with ‘always-on’ encryption that eliminates the risk of a data breach from media theft. flashRecover snapshots and replication meet backup compliance/DR requirements for both SAP and SAP HANA environments and delivers enhanced responsiveness for development teams.

Another Cisco validated design for flashStack involves Virtual Server Infrastructure with vSphere 6.0. This design provides guidance for how to best leverage the company’s vCenter plug-in for storage management, a free and simple mechanism to manage and provision flashArray storage directly inside the vSphere Web client. As a supported component, the flashArray plug-in allows users to perform a multitude of tasks in context to the VMware objects managed on a daily basis, including data stores and snapshots.

Pure Storage and Cisco also recently introduced a Cisco Validated Design for Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp with the ability to support 5,000 users. Designed to provide a faster and more resilient end-user experience than traditional physical desktops at under $50/desktop for storage costs, joint customers can expect a robust solution that eliminates downtime and performance issues with their VDI. A member of the Citrix Ready program, Pure Storage further supports Citrix VDI customers through the VDI Capacity Validation Program with solutions on the Citrix Ready Marketplace.

“flashStack from Pure Storage and Cisco has been verified as Citrix Ready XenApp and XenDesktop to provide a resilient infrastructure that delivers a superior experience for our mutual customers looking to rapidly deploy secure virtual apps and desktops with confidence,” said Sid Rabindran, director, Citrix Ready. “We value these relationships that continue to expand our capabilities to deliver a better customer experience.“

Another recent Cisco Validated Design, ‘flashStack Virtual Server Infrastructure with modern data protection,’ expands flashStack VSI to add holistic data protection from Commvault. Commvault software adds snapshot management, secondary storage with Cisco UCS S3260 storage servers, replication, active copy management, and VM archiving. This solution cuts administrative overhead while improving access, availability, and IT efficiency. Use cases vary and can include development and testing, DR, and/or long term data retention.

“Commvault, Cisco, and Pure Storage are all leaders in their respective markets and together they are providing a best in breed solution,” said Ralph Nimergood, VP, alliances and channels, Commvault. “Data Protection for flashStack VSI with the Commvault Data Platform provides a validated solution built on a modern approach to data protection that delivers enterprise recovery for today’s data center environments.“

FlashStack Reference Architecture
In keeping with the theme of simplicity, the companies have also designed a flashStack solution leveraging the flashArray//M and Cisco for compute and networking. Tested using high-bandwidth workloads to meet specific query performance and scale in size requirements designated by the SQL Server Performance team through its SQL Server 2016 Data Warehouse Fast Track program, the SQL Server 2016 Data Warehouse Fast Track reference architecture establishes an architecture ready to accommodate the most demanding complex read queries and scale requirements.

Further Collaboration
The two companies continue to collaborate and expand 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, which is available.