Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs) consist of systems and solutions that are designed, tested, and documented to facilitate and improve customer deployments. These designs incorporate a wide range of technologies and products into a portfolio of solutions that have been developed to address the business needs of our customers.

This document discusses the design principles that go into the FlashStack solution, which is a validated Converged Infrastructure(CI) jointly developed by Cisco and Pure Storage. The solution is a predesigned, bestpractice data center architecture with VMware vSphere built on the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS), the Cisco Nexus® 9000 family of switches, Cisco MDS 9000 family of Fibre Channel switches and Pure Storage FlashArray//M all flash array.