(reposted from blog.purestorage.com)

That we live in a world of constant change is a long accepted truism. Heraclitus of Ephesus, declared over 2,500 years ago that ever-present change is the fundamental essence of the universe – and this is doubly true for the technology realm. We have grown accustomed to new technology debuting at an ever-accelerating pace, promising to radically change our personal and work lives for the better.

Yet, for technical change to be successful at delivering on this promise, it needs to be the right kind of change. Simply making things faster or more powerful is insufficient and often counterproductive. This type of change often increases complexity, decreases reliability and results in overall lower efficiency. Successful technical change is not just faster and more powerful, but smarter as well. It needs to be easier to use and make us more agile.

The technologies you choose for your modern data centers need to introduce this “right” kind of change. The highly dense, virtualized compute and storage you are deploying demand both performance and agility – you have told us you need highly scalable solutions that are also simple to manage, self-driving and self-healing. The modern data centers you are managing and building demand higher network speeds required for hyperscale virtualization, software-defined data center architectures and high performance storage technologies based on flash – while expecting underlying infrastructure to deliver a cloud-like experience that is simple, agile, on-demand, and elastic.

At Pure Storage we believe in delivering self-driving solutions that help you shift from the endless cycle of reactive troubleshooting to spending time automating and orchestrating the infrastructure to deliver data-as-a-service – on-demand – to your development teams. And we aren’t alone in this belief. Today, our partner Cisco introduced two new 32G MDS 9000 Fibre Channel fixed-configuration switches for your modern Storage Area Network (SAN) that deliver greater performance while enabling simpler, more agile operations.

These next-generation MDS 32G switches enable scale, performance, visibility and operational excellence for efficient deployment of next-generation workloads. The two new Cisco MDS 9000 switches (the 48-Port MDS 9148T and 96-Port MDS 9396T) feature auto-zoning that facilitate detection of new host and storage devices to eliminate the pain and potential errors of manual zoning. They also allow operators to stay on top of all-flash array performance objectives by proactively monitoring for issues that could affect IO performance.

In addition to the next-generation switches, Cisco also announced the MDS Diagnostics suite and Cisco Data Center Network Manager (DCNM 11.0) that further streamline operations:

  • The MDS Diagnostics provides the fabric-wide visibility needed to guarantee continuous fabric availability for a diverse set of apps and workloads in the modern data center.
  • Cisco Data Center Network Manager (DCNM 11.0) includes an enhanced UI with new features to greatly enhance the support and management of the MDS product line. This features a complete redesign of the VSAN and Port Channel management to better align with typical customer workflows as well as simplify the end-to-end topology management that includes including virtual machine manager visualization.

As your data center infrastructure continues to change, make sure that it is the right kind of change – one that delivers a cloud-inspired data experience to all your environments, enables a big leap in performance beyond your current architecture and provides cost-effective economics. The combination of Pure Storage and Cisco MDS 9000 enables the scale, performance, visibility and operational excellence for efficient deployment of all your next-generation workloads.