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 a converged infrastructure solution that is simple, flexible, efficient, and costs less than legacy converged infrastructure solution based on traditional disk. The reference architecture covered in this document leverages the Pure Storage FlashArray//m, Cisco Nexus 9000 series and Cisco MDS 9100 series for the switching element and Cisco Fabric Interconnects 6300 series for System Management.FlashStack Mini with Citrix Xen Desktop and Hyper-V.