Two years ago, Pure made a strategic decision to expand the capabilities of Pure Storage’s all-flash platform into the adjacent market of Converged Infrastructure. The Converged Infrastructure market was showing robust signs of growth despite the market being saturated with solutions that were mostly based on legacy storage platforms.
It was clear that if a better converged stack was built based on all-flash storage, the solution would be wildly successful. Two foundational solutions were built; a handful of partners were recruited globally to enable the go-to-market motion, and we were off to the races. That was the birth of FlashStack.
Fast forward two years, and boy have we come a long way. The past year has been especially busy for team FlashStack. We worked hand-in-hand with the awesome UCS team at Cisco to build out a very expansive portfolio of joint solutions covering most major datacenter workloads. So whether you are deploying a server and/or desktop virtualization environment or a database workload based on Oracle, MS SQL, or SAP HANA, we have a solution for you. If you are familiar with the rigor that goes into building out Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs) and reference architectures, you know that the Cisco and Pure team has you covered on every detail of the solution deployment.
And rest assured, we haven’t stopped at just building solutions. We recently released our integration with Cisco’s UCS Director solution, which now allows the day to day management of FlashStack using UCS Director. Using the UCS Director plugin for Pure Storage, users can perform various tasks on the Pure Storage array related to volumes/hosts and snapshot management. We are also offering 5 built-in workflows with the connector. These workflows are:
- Advanced Fibre Channel end to end workflow that includes setup of Unified Compute System(UCS) template
- Advanced iSCSI end to end workflow that includes setup of UCS template
- Basic Fibre Channel end to end workflow that requires UCS template already setup on UCS Fabric Interconnect
- Basic iSCSI end to end workflow that requires UCS template already setup on UCS Fabric Interconnect
- VM provisioning specific to Pure Storage FlashArray
The code for the plugin and related documentation is available on GitHub here. If you are an active UCS Director user and have created custom workflows that you think would be helpful to the community, we would appreciate you sharing them via the GitHub repository.
And best of all, we are just getting started. Watch this space for more exciting announcements around joint solutions, deeper integrations focusing on infrastructure automation and cloud orchestration.
