Cisco Live 2025: Pure Storage Showcasing AI and Modern Virtualization Innovation

By Craig Waters, technical director focusing on FlashStack and Cisco solutions, Pure Storage, Inc.

Cisco Live 2025 is coming up soon from June 8-12 in San Diego, CA. Here’s a preview of some of the announcements we’ll be sharing at the event.

At this year’s Cisco Live, we’ll be covering a range of topics, including the FlashStack and Nutanix integration, which combines an industry’s powerful storage, compute, and networking with the hyperconverged infrastructure.

This year, Cisco Live is happening in sunny San Diego, CA, from June 8-12, and Pure Storage, Inc. is proud to be back as a sponsor. As one of the industry’s leading events for IT innovation, Cisco Live brings together thousands of technology professionals, thought leaders, and partners from around the globe – and we can’t wait to connect with all of you!

Join Pure Storage on the show floor to see how we’re helping customers build modern, cyber-resilient infrastructure with the speed, simplicity, and efficiency only Pure Storage can deliver. From AI-ready full stacks to cost-efficient modern virtualization options, we’re transforming the way organizations power mission-critical workloads.

What’s New at Cisco Live 2025
Pure Storage have a particularly exciting announcement to share this year. Recently at Nutanix .NEXT, we announced our game-changing integration of real external storage – the simplicity and flexibility of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure with the blazing speed and rock-solid reliability of FlashArray.

Rajiv Ramaswami, CEO, Nutanix, announces FlashStack with NCP at .NEXT 2025 keynote

But there was another announcement at .NEXT that we’re featuring at Cisco Live 2025: Pure Storage and Cisco’s FlashStack solution integrated with Nutanix. This solution combines an industry’s powerful storage, compute, and networking with a leading hyperconverged infrastructure, providing:

• High performance and scalability
• Granular storage control
• Preservation of existing investments
• Deeply integrated functionality and management

Over a Decade of Innovation
We’ve been collaborating with Cisco on a jointly engineered full-stack solution for over a decade (that’s right, over 10 years).

This converged infrastructure solution combines:

• Cisco Validated Designs
• Interoperability testing and support
• Management integration with Cisco Intersight
• Portworx integration for cost-effective containerized modern virtualization
• A meet-in-the-channel, partner-delivered, full-stack solution 

Over 5,000 customers are leveraging this joint solution, covering a multitude of use cases across multiple industries. 

The unique benefit of FlashStack is its stateless architecture, allowing customers to design their FlashStack deployment for their current application requirements while allowing them to simply augment their investment to support new business requirements without having to revisit their original design. 

Lifecycle management of FlashStack – NDU new capabilities without redesign
Click to enlarge

Here are some of the topics you’ll hear about from Pure Storage and Cisco at Cisco Live:

• AI PODs: These pre-defined, pre-configured full-stack AI solutions are designed to address the most common use cases.
• Modern virtualization alternatives: Pure Storage, Cisco, and Red Hat have partnered to bring down the cost of virtualization while simultaneously improving its performance and management with our Portwork OpenShift container-based solutions.
• Cyber resilience: Pure Storage offers the industry’s most resilient storage, integrated with Cisco solutions for XDR and integrations with the top SecOps providers.
• Storage as a service: The company’s Evergreen OPEX model is the industry’s original storage-as-a-service solution, supporting capacity on demand, predictable billing, and instant provisioning of secure isolated recovery environments.
• Data center power and cooling savings: FlashStack reduces your data center physical footprint and power consumption by 80%, providing the necessary headroom to run power-hungry modern workloads like AI.

Discover Effortless Enterprise Infrastructure
Imagine being able to non-disruptively add new technology hardware and software capabilities like NVMe, faster Ethernet networking, higher capacity FC SANs, the latest CPUs from Intel and AMD (in the same chassis!), and GPUs from NVIDIA, all in a modular fashion without compromising on downtime for your business.

Now, what if this same solution could support running multiple business-critical application use cases at the same time, including:

• AI
• Virtualization (both server and desktop)
• Containerization
• Databases (SQL, Oracle, SAP)
• Data protection/cyber resiliency
• Business continuity and disaster recovery

These are all part of this same full-stack solution. But that’s not all.

Enhancing FlashStack with Nutanix and Pure Storage: Combining HCI and CI
We’re continuing to enhance FlashStack by including new use cases that leverage the support of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure across multiple application use cases.

That’s right, HCI and CI co-existing to support customers in hybrid cloud, on premises and at the edge. So what does this unique new architecture do for you? It’s simple: This new flexible architecture maximizes your future flexibility.

For example:

• You can quickly and more effectively address the constantly changing needs of your organization and your clients. 
• You can more efficiently support your existing investments and eliminate forklift upgrades.
• You reduce the risk of business disruption with this pre-tested, pre-validated infrastructure.
• You can power your own innovation initiatives with modern, scalable infrastructure that is designed and built for change.

All simplified and verified by Pure Storage, Cisco, and Nutanix.

Resource:
Craig Waters at my #CiscoLive speaker session: The Fastest Path to a Successful AI Deployment – Date: Monday, June 9 – Time: 12:40pm – Location: Hall F, Content Corner Theater 1 – See how FlashStack can help you improve and simplify hybrid cloud infrastructure, and be sure to join us in person (booth #2541) at Cisco Live in San Diego, CA, from June 8-12 to learn more.