We are just a few days away from Pure//Accelerate conference in San Francisco. For one thing, I'm excited about going to a San Francisco conference that is not held at the Moscone Conference Center. Pier 48 is a great location, just across from the San Francisco Giants' ballpark where I spent many a cold and foggy night. I am actually willing to bet on the Giants' even year World Series Championship pattern, 2010, 2012, 2014 and 2016? Any taker?

Upcoming Reference Architecture for 5,000-seat Desktop Virtualization Deployment on FlashStack

Cisco is currently working on a Validated Design for deploying a 5,000-seat desktop and app virtualization architecture on Pure Storage all flash arrays with VMware Horizon 6, which we expect to publish soon. Cisco engineers invest thousands of hours in design and testing in every Cisco Validated Design. These Cisco Validated Designs deliver great agility by lowering the risk of deploying a specific VDI solution and increase the speed of deployment by providing prescriptive guidelines. These validated solutions offer a scalable, reliable and predictable foundation on which to build business value and lower TCO.

Desktop Virtualization has expanded from the original task worker use case to knowledge workers, power users and even designers. While cost is still an important factor, one key element for Desktop Virtualization's success is a seamless user experience combined with high performance and reliability. Cisco offers a broad portfolio of architectures based on Cisco Unified Computing Systems (UCS) which provide the foundation for desktop virtualization deployments. We recognize that enterprises will choose to architect their data center in different ways. Some will go for a best of breed approach and assemble discrete compute, storage and network components that meet their specific needs or take the route of hyperconverged infrastructure.   Many will take a more architectural approach by using pre-validated, pre-tested converged infrastructure which reduces deployment time and risk. Cisco addresses the needs of these different IT deployment models through a broad portfolio of converged infrastructure solutions based on UCS servers, such as Pure Storage FlashStack.

FlashStack Converged Infrastructure

FlashStack Converged Infrastructure combines Pure Storage FlashArray//m technology with Cisco UCS B200 blade servers and Cisco Nexus 5548UP switches to create a high performance, scalable infrastructure for deploying thousands of virtual desktops in minutes. You can scale desktops quickly and linearly without performance degradation, system latency remains low as virtual desktop numbers scale from hundreds to thousands making FlashStack well-suited for enterprise VDI deployments. With support for both Citrix and VMware virtualization software FlashStack addresses all VDI use cases.

Attend Cisco and Pure Session Tuesday 3/15 at 3:00 PM Pacific Time

But don't just take my word for it. Join us on Tuesday at 3:00 PM Pacific Time for a joint session with Pure and listen to FlashStack customers discuss their VDI deployment experience, what business imperatives they addressed and what they attribute their success to. We will also have two VDI architects from Pure Storage and Cisco describe the configuration of the upcoming Cisco Validated Design and share best practices recommendations.

Oh, and keeping the best for the end, you won't want to miss Cisco's CTO Zorawar Biri Singh fireside chat with Pure Storage's CEO Scott Dietzen on Tuesday. Biri and Scott will discuss how the trends of Cloud, IoT, Big Data and Storage are impacting the evolution of the IT industry

So join us at Pure//Accelerate, stop by the Cisco's juice bar, get hydrated and talk to us about your desktop and app virtualization needs.

For more information about Cisco Desktop Virtualization solutions visit cisco.com/go/vdi