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, best practice data center architecture for implementation of a continuously available stretched data center architecture for VMware vSphere. It utilizes Cisco ACI Multi-Pod and Pure Storage ActiveCluster to extend both the network and storage between differing sites to be used by Cisco UCS compute for seamless connectivity between multiple FlashStack data center placements ranging from within a common data center, to crossing adjacent regions connecting multiple metropolitan locations.