Pure Storage has announced the official recognition of, and partnership with, Cisco with the release of the first Cisco Validated Design (CVD) for FlashStack. The CVD for VDI indicates that FlashStack is now a recognized converged infrastructure solution based on Cisco unified network and UCS.
Back when Cisco was promoting its own flash storage technology, Invicta, there was no official recognition of FlashStack. Over the last year or so it has become clear that FlashStack would eventually be supported, however the CVD needed to be completed. In the meantime, Datalink supported FlashStack and was recognized as the first FlashStack authorized support partner, and remains the top FlashStack partner with over 20 customers.
The partnership between Pure Storage and Cisco will be very important as Pure Storage moves to compete with other converged infrastructure solutions such as VCE VBLOCK and NetApp FlexPod. Cisco sent their CTO Zorawar Biri Singh to the Pure Accelerate conference to discuss the future vision for Cisco in the rapidly changing technology landscape. Datalink remains committed to Cisco converged infrastructure and FlashStack, an all-flash powered solution targeted at VDI, dense virtualization and mission critical database workloads.