Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 10 | Page 54

INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Data Centres At a glance… Pure Storage releases FlashBlade and FlashArray//m10 with UCS, network with ACI and SDN solutions, to now HyperFlex for storage. Earlier this year, Cisco announced its intent to acquire CliQr Technologies Inc. The CliQr CloudCenter platform will provide customers with comprehensive yet simplified, application- centric orchestration for private, hybrid and public clouds. CliQr provides customers with a single, intuitive platform that helps customers manage the entire application lifecycle across hybrid IT environments, whether simple or complex. The CliQr platform ties business applications to heterogeneous data centre infrastructure, running across bare-metal, containers and virtualised environments. These announcements are the first of many hardware and software innovations Cisco plans to bring to market in 2016. The goal is to help customers achieve highly secure, simplified, scalable and cost-effective data centres that keep pace with the speed of business, and accelerate adoption of hybrid cloud environments. Cisco HyperfFlex Systems Based on Cisco’s UCS technology, Cisco HyperfFlex Systems represent the next generation in hyper-converged infrastructure with a leap in technology that delivers the industry’s first complete end-to-end hyper-converged solution. The HyperFlex portfolio extends Cisco’s UCS and converged infrastructure businesses, which together have over 50,000 customers worldwide. The HyperFlex series makes an ideal platform for customers deploying enterprise applications in their data centres, and for remote and branch offices where hyper-converged infrastructure is expected to become a multi- billion industry over the next three to four years. 54 INTELLIGENTCIO Pure Storage has announced the regional release of FlashBlade, an all-flash storage platform designed to store data and FlashArray// m10, a new entry-level model of its flagship purpose-built all-flash storage array. Together, Pure Storage FlashBlade and the Pure Storage FlashArray form a complete platform for organisations to build their all-flash cloud. FlashBlade is built on an innovative elastic scale-out architecture, which combines commodity hardware components with unique software and ultra-dense packaging to achieve extreme performance, scale, density and efficiency, at a cost of less than $1 per usable GB. “The value that can be gained from efficiently storing and analysing unstructured data has a transformative effect on business,” said John Hayes, Co-founder and Chief Architect, Pure Storage. “FlashBlade unlocks new capabilities and use cases that are simply not possible with today’s existing solutions by delivering real-time analytics at massive scale and blazing speeds to enable the future of innovation.” FlashArray//m10 is a storage solution for mid-sized IT, as well as an affordable entry point to flash for larger enterprises looking to flash-enable a first key business application. It offers small-to-medium (SME) size enterprises the same simple, reliable and performant storage previously available only to large enterprises. FlashArray//m10 provides SMEs the ability to accelerate business-critical applications, virtualise everything and implement an internal all-flash cloud. “This addition to the FlashArray family allows us to provide an entry-level, cost-effective option for companies that want to try purpose-built all-flash for the first time, and accelerate their journey to an all-flash datacenter,” said Matt Kixmoeller, VP of Products, Pure Storage. “Cost as a barrier to all-flash adoption is a relic of the past. Companies of all sizes can now experience the simplicity, high- performance and reliability that comes with all-flash from Pure.” www.intelligentcio.com