Redefining Infrastructure Strategy for a Fragmented, Hybrid Future

Flexibility, collaboration, and modularity are defining the next wave of enterprise IT

Enterprise infrastructure strategy is entering a new phase—one where the goal is no longer just centralization or consolidation, but intelligent distribution. IT leaders are now balancing performance, governance, and agility across environments that span on-prem, cloud, and edge. And the playbook is changing.

What organizations need today isn’t just technology—they need consistency across that technology. They need flexibility in how it’s deployed, and confidence that the decisions they make today won’t limit them tomorrow.

This is where partnerships matter. And it’s why Cisco, Nutanix, and Pure Storage are coming together to offer something more than a new box with a new name.

From Standardization to Strategic Modularity: The Next Chapter in Infrastructure Design

For years, traditional integrated stacks delivered what enterprises needed most: reliability, predictability, and simplicity. They were the right answer in a time when stability and standardization were the primary goals of IT.

But today’s reality is more nuanced.

The rise of AI, hybrid cloud, and edge computing is reshaping infrastructure strategy. Organizations are navigating a wider range of environments and application types—each with its own operational, economic, and architectural considerations. The question isn’t “which stack?”—it’s “how do I make the best use of multiple technologies, without the overhead of stitching them together myself?”

That’s where this new phase of collaboration between Cisco, Nutanix, and Pure Storage comes in, delivering FlashStack for Nutanix. We’re not abandoning the benefits of converged infrastructure—we’re evolving them. Together, we’re offering pre-integrated modularity: solutions that are validated, optimized, and supported end-to-end, but still leave room for customer choice, customization, and adaptability.

This approach doesn’t replace what came before—it builds on it. It recognizes that simplicity and flexibility aren’t opposites. With the right architecture and the right partnerships, you can have both.

What It Means in Practice

• Operational consistency across a distributed footprint—from core to edge to cloud
• Open integration between control planes, like Cisco Intersight and Nutanix Prism, so teams can simplify operations rather than manage islands
• Validated architectures that reduce risk and accelerate time to value, without adding lock-in
• Support for mixed workload realities, including modular compute expansion and hybrid app models

This is what next-gen converged infrastructure looks like: not just converged hardware, but converged intent—designed to meet organizations where they are and move with them as priorities shift.

Beyond the Stack: Reclaiming IT Strategy

One of the biggest lessons of the past few years is that the pace of change in business now outpaces the refresh cycles of traditional IT. Infrastructure that can’t adapt quickly becomes a constraint, not a capability.

That’s why this partnership is important. It reflects a broader industry trend: moving away from rigid “one-size-fits-all” platforms, toward adaptable infrastructure strategies that prioritize openness, interoperability, and ecosystem collaboration.

By aligning innovation across Cisco compute and networking, Nutanix Cloud Platform and Pure Storage FlashStack with FlashArray, we’re helping customers build infrastructure that’s not just high-performing, but strategically future-ready.

Cisco and Pure Storage have spent years simplifying infrastructure through converged systems that just work. Now, together with Nutanix, we’re responding to a clear market need: a fully integrated, flexible, and validated platform that reduces time-to-value and adapts as customer priorities evolve. It’s convergence with choice—not compromise.

Why This Moment Matters

The convergence of AI, hybrid cloud, and edge computing is creating new pressure points for IT teams. At the same time, budgets aren’t getting bigger—and talent isn’t getting easier to find. Simplicity, flexibility, and shared innovation aren’t just nice-to-haves—they’re survival tools.

So whether you’re rethinking how to deploy infrastructure across remote sites, modernizing data centers with hybrid capabilities, or trying to simplify how infrastructure is managed at scale, the real question is this:

Are your infrastructure choices aligned to change—or resisting it?

Optimizing for Performance and Choice

This is the question we’re addressing in our continued work with Nutanix.

• Aligning performance to real-world workloads: Our support for Nutanix on the latest UCS M8 servers isn’t about speed for speed’s sake—it’s about giving teams the headroom to run more, consolidate more, and do it efficiently.
• Scaling with precision, not just capacity: Compute-only nodes offer a practical lever for teams managing CPU-bound licensing models. It’s a way to grow infrastructure intelligently—without unnecessary sprawl or cost.
• Operational visibility as a first principle: As environments stretch across data center, edge, and cloud, operational clarity becomes critical. Our integration with Nutanix Prism Central continues to evolve—not to add dashboards, but to reduce the time it takes to understand, manage, and adapt complex systems.

This isn’t just about technology—it’s about reducing friction so teams can make better decisions, faster. Because at the end of the day, scale isn’t just a function of infrastructure. It’s a function of how well your infrastructure understands your intent.

A Better Way Forward

What Cisco, Nutanix, and Pure Storage are offering is not just a new solution. It’s an invitation to reframe infrastructure decisions around adaptability—to deploy best-in-class technologies without being locked into a single path, and to operate across silos without managing in silos.

This is what the next evolution of FlashStack represents. And we believe it reflects where infrastructure strategy is going next: not just toward faster or cheaper—but toward freedom.

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