FlashStack – Cutting Edge Converged Infrastructure At-a-Glance
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Digital transformation creates challenges for IT organizations. The need to support distributed organizations and pull information from a wide variety of sources can challenge your organization's efficiency and effectiveness as well as your budget. Add to this your team's responsibility to maintain a powerful and complex environment, and these challenges become magnified.
Every day there is more and more data to process, with most data remaining unmonetized. As more customers, employees, and applications attempt to gain access to data insight in real time, the need to quickly ingest, collect, store, and process data is increasing at a rapid-fire pace—a pace that aging infrastructure even two to three years old simply may not be able to handle. An ideal solution would be to run your traditional enterprise applications as well as emerging technologies on infrastructure that is simple, extensible, reliable, and easy to manage, has excellent performance, can help reduce your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), and can speed your Return On Investment (ROI). Such a solution would provide a consistent, policy-based framework that optimizes an application’s performance.
Modernize your data center
Prevalidated for timely, repeatable, and consistent deployments
Accelerate time to results
Simple, no-tradeoff architecture to ensure success
Eliminate silos
Enterprise performance and availability for all workloads
Enable multicloud
Natively extend private to public clouds
Manage seamlessly
Centralized, cloud-based management options
A new approach: FlashStack converged infrastructure
Cisco and Pure Storage deliver FlashStack, a modern converged infrastructure solution that is smarter, simpler, and more efficient and more powerful than ever before. FlashStack is ready for use with virtual machines, containers, and hybrid cloud while retaining the advantages of predictability and efficiency of dedicated compute and storage tiers. With FlashStack, customers can modernize their operational model, stay ahead of business demands and application needs, and protect and secure their applications and data regardless of the deployment model on premises, at the edge, or in the cloud.
FlashStack with FlashArray
● Data center consolidation or hybrid cloud
● Cisco UCS® B-Series Blade Servers or C-Series Rack Servers
● All-Flash block storage
● Fibre Channel or iSCSI
FlashStack with FlashBlade
● Data warehouse, analytics or artificial intelligence
● Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers or C-Series Rack Servers
● All-Flash file and object storage
● Network File System (NFS) or Amazon S3
The FlashStack advantage
● Simple, no-tradeoff architecture that eliminates disparate hardware silos
● Proven, validated interoperability for confident application deployment
● End-to-end NVMe, decreasing latency and increasing CPU utilization
● Cisco MDS 9000 multilayer SAN switches that help lower the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of storage environments
● High-performance and high-density with Cisco Nexus® 9000 Series Switches
● Converged infrastructure for multi-hypervisor, bare-metal, or container deployments
● Built for the cloud, including full integration with cloud platforms from Cisco, VMware, OpenStack, and others
● Extensible to new workloads such as AI, machine learning, and deep learning in the same management framework
● Offers SaaS management option, with Cisco Intersight™, reducing the complexity and effort required to deploy, upgrade, and maintain infrastructure
Architect it once, and adopt new technology without disruption
IT-infrastructure sprawl hinders both the agility needed to adapt to changing business dynamics and the ability to scale on demand. As a result, new technology is slow to deploy, requiring regular and time-consuming changes to data center architectures. FlashStack’s fully modular and nondisruptive architecture abstracts hardware into software for nondisruptive changes that allow customers to seamlessly deploy new technology without having to rearchitect their data center solutions.
Redefine business continuity and disaster recovery
Business continuity is a major requirement for most enterprises, regardless of size. FlashStack delivers high availability by leveraging Cisco® and Pure technologies: Cisco UCS, Cisco Nexus switching with ACI Anywhere, and Purity ActiveCluster, used together, provide these capabilities.
Purity ActiveCluster enables live migration between any two FlashStack systems, or rack-level high-availability clustering of four controllers for maximum resilience. Purity ActiveCluster really shines in a metropolitan use case: simply take a running volume and “stretch” it between two sites up to 50 miles apart, with zero additional configuration required. Finally, Purity ActiveCluster is fully integrated with asynchronous snapshot replication, enabling a third replication-copy to be set to a data center anywhere on the globe.