FlashStack with Nutanix - Part 2

So you decided to come back for Part 2 - good on you. Where was I? Ah yes - the challenges customers are facing. How awesome would it be if a partnership across three companies provided a flexible solution that allowed customers to do what they want, when they want, on their own terms, while saving time and money.

It's hard for a single company to do this, much less three independent companies with different goals coming together to solve this many challenges. This is exactly what Cisco, Pure Storage, and Nutanix are aiming to do.

What is FlashStack?

I've been calling this solution FlashStack but what is a FlashStack? Contrary to popular belief, it is not a bunch of flash-enabled devices in a data center stacked in a pile trying to accomplish a thing.

No no - FlashStack is a converged infrastructure solution resulting from a decade-plus-long partnership between Cisco and Pure Storage. It combines Cisco’s best-in-class hardware (compute and networking) with Pure’s all-flash storage into a single, pre-validated system / reference architecture. The combination of these assets are thoroughly tested and documented through official Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs) - aka, not someone's basement.

Generally speaking, FlashStack eliminates guesswork for customers, providing a reliable, high-performance infrastructure baseline that ensures interoperability, reduced deployment risk, and lower time to resolution when (if) issues occur.

Last but not least FlashStack also provides ease of infrastructure management for customers through Cisco Intersight. Not only does Intersight provide in-depth views and management functions for UCS servers, but there are also integrations with Pure Storage to provide visibility into the entire stack (Nutanix too).

But VMware (Broadcom)

I've gone this long without mentioning it so here we go. What's arguably one of the main ingredients missing from the above explanation? A partnership between Cisco and Pure Storage is great but FlashStack as a solution often revolves around a hypervisor.

That hypervisor? ESXi. Until this acquisition of VMware by Broadcom (ugh), no one really had to talk about this. Anyone familiar with the offering knew? assumed? that at the core of the solution, the most likely engine to be used was the VMware ESXi hypervisor. This isn't always there case, there are instances of non-VMware bare-metal deployments but the majority of the solutions used ESXi.

This assumption flipped overnight and the questions started to be asked - Can I do a FlashStack with a non-VMware hypervisor, specifically - Nutanix AHV? The answer will very soon to be:

Yup, that's right - this decade-plus-long partnership between Cisco and Pure Storage will soon be embarking in uncharted territory by introducing the Nutanix hypervisor (AHV) as a core virtualization engine.

This is a big deal. Right or wrong - customers who go down this path often have a check list; ESXi does this - I need the next hypervisor to the same. This approach/conversation alone can choke the total available internet bandwidth, but the reality is that when customers go down this path, Nutanix's hypervisor - AHV - more often then not checks all the technical boxes, and soon - will check off even more.

The goal was to address all the challenges we discussed in Part 1. Is the solution achieving all of these? Like anything, it of course depends on the bazillions of different situations customers are faced with, but the solution tries pretty damn hard and Cisco's story truly shines. Let's walk backwards:

The Challenges Solved - FlashStack with Nutanix

✅ HCI Architecture Scaling Limitations: Not everyone likes to hear this, I'm not the first, nor will I be the last to say it, but it needs to be part of the conversation. HCI doesn't always offer the resource scaling flexibility customers need or want. This will be introduced as a core function of FlashStack with Nutanix. Need only compute resources? Cisco allows you to do this. Need only storage resources? Scale out your Pure Storage array. Need both? Ok - knock yourself out (not literally, please).

✅ Budget Pressures: Have unlimited budget? Stop reading and call me. If you don't - guess what? You can use your existing investment in Pure Storage to create a Nutanix cluster. Not good enough? Reuse your existing qualified Cisco UCS hardware. Not only will this include HCI qualified hardware but Cisco & Nutanix will also be introducing support for Cisco's older B200 M5 and M6 blades. This is huge. There are things you should know before you go down this path which I'll address in a later post (or when documents get released, you can read them for yourself).

✅ Time Constraints: With the above in mind - imagine being able to start testing this solution without having to procure new hardware and once proven - deploying at scale without having to get new budget approvals for hardware ... we all "love" the procurement process. What about deployment and validation? Yup - there are absolutely plans from Cisco to release CVDs (Cisco Validated Designs) for FlashStack with Nutanix that help customers deploy in a pre-validated manner, accurately, and on the first try (assuming we've all read the manuals ...).

✅ Hardware Reuse:
       > Reuse Cisco UCS hardware: <see GIF above> Yup
       > Reuse Pure Storage array: Yup
       > Reuse Cisco Networking: Yup
       > Reuse Cables: Yup - probably ... you get the point. The expensive investments        of a data center can all be reused to make this solution work. Brownfield and        Greenfield support. (I'm not a coder - deal with my list if it looks funky on your        device.)

✅ Hypervisor Diversification: As mentioned above - FlashStack often assumed the ESXi hypervisor and that's great. Run ESXi if you need to. FlashStack with Nutanix sort of implies you're running the Nutanix AHV hypervisor (Is this like saying "I went to the ATM Machine"?). Need FlashStack with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, Cisco has that too, though ... something something saying something nice. The point is - If a customer doesn't know what they want, doesn't know if the different technical requirements will be met, or just strives to have a cloud-like operational model inside their own four walls - Cisco and Pure Storage provide this flexibility - hypervisor be damned!

✅ Flexible Solution: If you've gotten through this wall of text and are still questioning the flexibility of what Cisco and Pure Storage offer, well - I got nothing ... other than: Maybe you need a way to finance the Nutanix licensing through Cisco Capital? Cisco can do that. Enterprise Agreements - Yup! Nutanix license portability - ya, that works also (but why would you run on anything but Cisco after reading the above?). This is one of the most flexible and innovative solution the three companies can offer and soon - the solution will include the Nutanix hypervisor.

Want, no, NEED more? Come back for Part 3 where I'll get into more technical details of the solution ... at launch? <the suspense builds> (Part 3)