Every application and workload can benefit from a transformative infrastructure platform that accelerates time to deployment, lowers overall IT costs, reduces deployment risk and never requires a forklift upgrade.
In this article, we explore how the FlashStack infrastructure platform from Cisco and Pure Storage can empower four use cases that are vital to digital transformation and IT modernization.
SAP
If your business relies on SAP as one of its mission-critical applications, this is no time to be sitting still. While the timing remains fluid, SAP is planning to end or modify support for a variety of solutions, so the migration to S/4HANA should begin in earnest, sooner rather than later.
FlashStack is now optimized for hybrid cloud SAP use cases. The architectural model puts data at the center of the SAP strategy, so the SAP environment can fluidly handle new data-intensive solutions such as artificial intelligence and advanced analytics, regardless of where critical data is captured or stored. For SAP customers, specific benefits include the ability to:
- Deploy SAP in hours versus days or weeks using traditional IT stacks.
- Reduce manual copy, clone and restore tasks up to 90%.
- Reduce data by an average of 4.5-to-1 through compression and deduplication.
- Reduce storage costs by up to 54% and reduce management and support time by 65%.
- Consolidate and scale SAP workloads with no performance degradation.
Oracle
Oracle deployments can be complicated. They are the foundation for many mission-critical applications and workloads, impacting virtually all business operations, including customer experience, HR, sales, marketing, finance and beyond.
Maximizing availability and lowering total cost of ownership are top priorities for IT. In today’s environment, it is also important to modernize the underlying infrastructure to deliver cloud-native capabilities and support for simplicity, mobility, performance and ever-growing capacity.
With FlashStack, IT teams can use Cisco Validated Designs to:
- Provide predictable performance of server, network and storage on a per-workload basis.
- Smooth scalability of performance and capacity to meet growth needs.
- Ensure high availability of database instances—without performance compromise—through software and hardware upgrades.
This delivers significant benefits to the business, such as:
- Provide executives with near real-time data on key measurements.
- Run critical reports multiple times during the day.
- Reduce runtime of reports from hours (or even weekends) to minutes.
- Achieve linear scalability with sub-millisecond response times.
- Gain greater resiliency and ease of management and reduce data center floor space.
Artificial intelligence
AI is one of the cornerstone use cases for modern businesses. Within the next five years, at least 90% of new applications will embed AI, and already more than 40% of digital transformation initiatives are supported by AI capabilities, according to IDC.
Despite those lofty predictions, the path to AI is not always smooth. Any AI initiative is only as strong as its underlying data, and that requires a data-first infrastructure model. Enterprise Research Group identifies several critical characteristics required by the underlying infrastructure:
- The ability to process massive amounts of data from both structured and unstructured sources.
- Elastic, scale-out, high-density storage for file- and object-based environments.
- A storage architecture that delivers extreme bandwidth and high IOPS performance, resiliency and capacity.
FlashStack for AI is the industry’s first solution designed to offer a complete end-to-end AI pipeline. With FlashStack for AI, organizations can deploy a validated architecture for AI workloads that reduces risks and simplifies management in building an infrastructure for AI use cases.
In short, FlashStack for AI lets data scientists focus on data science rather than complex and difficult-to-maintain infrastructure “science projects."
FlashStack: Defining the Modern Infrastructure
IT teams are continually challenged when it comes to deploying CI and HCI infrastructures. Read this paper to learn how FlashStack can help with those challenges while being able to scale easily to support the future.
Download NowVirtual desktop infrastructure (VDI)
VDI is another use case that places huge demands on the storage infrastructure for capacity, simplicity, performance and resiliency. With FlashStack, customers can take advantage of Cisco Validated Designs to reduce risk, speed deployments and simplify ongoing management.
Validated solutions enable customers to know they can scale up to and beyond 5,000 users with a building block approach. Benefits include:
- Reduce cost and complexity through validated designs.
- Improve the user experience by adding NVIDIA graphic processor acceleration.
- Start small and scale as needed to keep pace with business needs and help pilot programs succeed.
- Streamline operations with centralized management.
- Reduce storage costs through greater efficiencies and integrated deduplication.
Conclusion
The four use cases discussed here are all critical for digital transformation, and they all benefit from a modern approach to infrastructure strategy, deployment and operations. But, of course, they are not the only use cases that benefit from IT modernization. For information about modernizing these and other use cases important to your business, please visit Cisco and Pure Storage to learn more about FlashStack.
