Pivot3 Wants Its Tech to Be All the RAIGE
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Pivot3,
a virtual distributed RAID vendor, will use $24 million it raised in additional
venture capital funding to expand marketing, sales and support to channel
partners selling its RAID Across Independent Gigabit Ethernet, or RAIGE,
technology.
Vice president of Marketing Jeff Bell said the additional funding also will help
extend the technology's reach into other storage-intensive verticals such as financial
services and health care. Pivot3 RAIGE is currently used by several city
and local governments to store video surveillance files and also has been
embraced by casino customers,
Bell
said.
"We
want to extend the base technology to other markets beyond video surveillance;
we understand that is an application niche,"
Bell
said. The company currently has about six resellers and plans to expand
that number to more than 20 by the end of 2008,
Bell
said.
The funding will allow Pivot3 to provide sales and marketing support to more
partners as well as aid in recruiting partners nationwide.
RAIGE
technology is a networked version of traditional RAID storage,
Bell
said. Storage nodes are managed not through a traditional controller,
said
Bell,
but through a state-of-the-art architecture that allows servers to access data
in parallel across multiple nodes at once. Removing the need for a storage
controller removed not only a cost concern, but a performance inhibitor,
Bell
said.
"RAIGE coordinates data access without the need for front-end
controllers,"
Bell
said. While not every customer needs that kind of access,
Bell
said VARs and customers find that replacing storage controllers that are too
small and have become "bottlenecks" is costly and inefficient. "There
are ways to architect systems with faster controllers, but [the controllers]
need to be bigger, which could result in a customer having to rip and
replace,"
Bell
said. The Pivot3 system allows for additional nodes instead, which is
much cheaper and easier for customers, he said.
"RAIGE
is great for applications that are data-intensive and require constant access
to data that's constantly changing and flooding the system,"
Bell
said, like the $7 billion video surveillance market, where Pivot3 partners have
found a lucrative market for the vendor's products.
