Converged Infrastructure featuring all-flash storage offers the promise of ease of use, faster performance, and better ROI.  This is particularly true in the SAP world where the ability to rapidly access and process critical data can have a huge impact on one's business.

We understand this quite well because at Cisco we run our own business on SAP, and use in-memory HANA-based analytics to deliver real-time insights every day to our various lines of business.   In fact, the first reference architecture for Big Data and SAP HANA Vora is just one of our many co-innovations with SAP, and we couldn't be more pleased with the business improvements it has helped us achieve.

Our latest innovation to help SAP users gain maximum benefit from their data center investment isFlashStack for SAP HANA, a joint all-flash solution from Cisco and Pure Storage.   If you're reading this blog, you are almost certainly familiar with Pure Storage.   But you may not know that Gartner identifies Pure Storage as one of the highest rated flash storage providers.  ("2016 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays")

Characterizing Cisco as "the pioneer of converged infrastructure," Pure Storage CEO, Scott Dietzen, noted that the release of FlashStack is part of Pure's expanded relationship with Cisco. And in an interview with ChannelBuzz said FlashStack is an important element of "an environment that augurs a bright future for Pure."

So what is FlashStack and what can it do for your SAP environment?

FlashStack combines compute, network, storage hardware and virtualization software, into a single, integrated all-flash architecture:

• Speeds time to deployment -Fully tested, validated, and documented for rapid deployment and reduced management complexity.

• Lowers overall IT costs -Dramatic savings in power, cooling, and space with 100% Flash storage.

• Scales easily without disruption -Consolidate 100's of enterprise-class applications in a single rack.

• Delivers flexibility to support your most intensive workloads -Suitable for enterprise applications such as SAP, Big Data and real-time analytics, and heavy transactional databases.

• Reduces operational risk -?Highly available architecture with no single point of failure, non-disruptive operations, and no downtime.

To make integration of FlashStack within your SAP Data Center as simple as possible, especially in SAP Tailored Datacenter Integration landscapes, Cisco and Pure collaborated on a new Cisco Validated Design for FlashStack for SAP HANA TDI.

If you are interested in implementing an all-flash solution for SAP, please click on the link above for a faster, more reliable, fully predictable deployment.