For people all over the world, working from home means finding new ways to interact with our coworkers, customers, and partners. Many of us are bringing our family and pets into online meetings (not always intentionally), using virtual meeting backgrounds (mine is a local English pub), and learning to maintain productivity levels while staying both physically and mentally fit.
For enterprises, however, this sudden increase in supporting remote employees can present different challenges, including growing pains in your IT infrastructure. This includes new needs and pressures to:
- Scale solutions to support more remote desktops.
- Improve desktop response times to help with productivity.
- Simplify solutions and their delivery to help ongoing operational management.
And do all these things while continuing to provide remote workers with secure access to the information they need to be productive.
New VDI Bundles from Pure and Cisco
To meet these challenges, Pure Storage® is focused on simplifying how you order and receive shipments of VDI infrastructure. We’ve teamed up with Cisco, one of our favourite alliance partners (think FlashStack™), to create compelling new bundles that combine the best compute and storage products from both companies.
We’ve brought together not just best-in-class technology, but bundled solutions designed to streamline and speed the shipping process (think quick) via our joint channel partners.
Compute
These bundles come from Cisco via its CCW quoting tool as a VDI solution (available to Cisco partners and sales reps).
The building block for each bundle is a minimum of 1,000 desktops with incremental growth of blades/chassis for 1,000, 500, and 125 desktops based on a single Cisco UCS B200 M5 Blade server.
Desktop sizing for these bundles is based on the following Microsoft Windows target user and virtual machine resource configuration:
You can order compute starter bundles with or without Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnects (FIs), depending on if you’re doing a net-new VDI deployment or expanding an existing one:
- QS-1000 Seat UCS B200 M5 VDI-Starter Bundle-With FIs¹
- QS-1000 Seat UCS B200 M5 VDI-Starter Bundle-No FI
These bundles include everything you need to get started with a VDI workload: 5108 Chassis, 2304 IOMs, power supplies, cables, and of course 8 x B200 M5 blades.
A key benefit of Cisco UCS is its stateless nature, which gives you the ability to seamlessly scale compute. Using expansion bundles, you can add increments of 1000, 500, or even 125 desktops:
- QS-1000 Seat UCS B200 M5 VDI-Starter Bundle-No FI
- QS-500 Seat-Expansion Chassis with 4 UCS B200 M5 Nodes
- QS-125-Seat UCS B200 M5 Expansion Node
Storage
These Pure FlashArray™ bundles come from Pure via SFDC (available to Pure Partners and Sales Reps).
We’ve aligned these bundles to an initial deployment of 1,000 desktops with additional starter bundles based on 2,500 and 5,000 desktops, giving you flexibility on where you start your FlashStack VDI journey:
- QS-1000 Seat FlashArray//X10 R3 VDI-Storage Starter Bundle
- QS-2500 Seat FlashArray//X20 R3 VDI-Storage Starter Bundle
- QS-5000 Seat FlashArray//X50 R3 VDI-Storage Starter Bundle
Pure Storage products give you the opportunity to leverage the Evergreen ™ subscription model, which enables you to scale storage without having to repurchase all the components.
We can non-disruptively scale your initial storage purchase all the way up to 5,000 desktops by simply adding an Evergreen upgrade flex bundle. That will provide more performance (upgrade your controllers) and increase capacity (add more datapacks):
- QS-1000 to 2500 Seat Storage Performance/Capacity Upgrade Bundle
- QS-2500 to 5000 Seat Storage Performance/Capacity Upgrade Bundle
Final Word
With these quick-ship bundles, you can scale both compute and storage in a disaggregated, independent way to support VDI solutions based on the number of desktops you require. This will help you quickly build new work-from-home infrastructure or augment your existing environment to meet increased demand.
Speak with your preferred partner or Cisco/Pure sales rep today to find out more.
1) Requires Evergreen Gold subscription
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