Combined fail-over protection server and networked storage vendor Pivot3 is expanding its end markets this week with its new Data Protection Platform which it has qualified with ten ISVs.
Pivot3 software aggregates the disk, network and compute resources of commodity server appliances to simplify configuration, failover-protect both storage and ISV data protection applications and open up parallel access to the hard disk drives for maximum throughput, the company said. The use of virtual servers in place of physical servers provides an instant ROI for end users and resellers. The linear scaling of performance allows the system to support deduplication streams at up to 20 terabytes/hour.
Resellers have deployed the Pivot3 Scale-out Data Protection Platform to protect Exchange data, medical images and hosted disaster recovery environments.
Pivot3’s value proposition sweet spot is markets that require high-capacity, disk-based backup, recovery deduplication and replication. The company’s less expensive server appliances replace the industry standard servers that are required with such scale out storage solutions, thereby reducing the overall cost of the solution to businesses that have such storage needs. For instance, Pivot3’s initial vertical market was video surveillance storage systems where the company has about 50 channel partners.
Lee Caswell, founder and chief marketing officer of Pivot3 explained to Channel Insider that the company’s goal was to create a very large storage pool and iSCSI SAN that would scale on capacity and performance based on commodity building blocks.
“We integrated server virtualization for the first time back into the storage platform,” said Caswell, who previously had served as VMware’s first storage executive and before that as general manager of Adaptec’s storage solutions Group. “Customers used to have to buy servers and storage separately.” By combining the two Pivot3 offers innovation on the hardware cost side, which Caswell points out is about 60 percent of the cost of a solution.
For instance, he said, if you put 92 servers in front of two petabytes of storage, that costs a lot of money. Pivot3’s solution eliminates the need for those servers.
In case you haven’t noticed, adding the servers into the storage is the same concept to the converged architecture that HP and Cisco have been pitching with their compute, storage and networking solutions, as well as Oracle’s Cloud in a Box.
“This is directly competitive to those systems,” Caswell said. However, he admits, that the performance will not be as high as with the complete server solution. As time goes on he expects Pivot3 to grow more competitive in the compute performance area.
Pivot3 is looking to grow from 50 resellers to 100 in the next four months.
For Bob Hodge, president of DeviceLogix, a Texas based systems integrator and hosting services company, the ability to easily add additional storage played a large part in his decision to go with Pivot3.
“Not only does Pivot3 offer a straight cost savings, but now my engineers can focus on a single storage base rather than be familiar with multiple vendors,” he told Channel Insider. Hodges said he considered going with Virtual Iron instead, but was glad that he didn’t after Oracle purchased them and killed off the package. “We try to be careful with the products we go with and not do too many of them.”
