Pivot3
Global HCI Delivering High Performance Enterprise IT Workloads

Server technology has become progressively more powerful following Moore's law. Despite Moore’s more recent speculation, the number of servers has exploded as enterprises support an ever increasing number of applications and business initiatives, resulting in an exponential growth in the volume of data. It is a challenge for storage and also provides new possibilities for CIOs to devise effective ways to make sense of the data and drive better business outcomes. “Pivot3 Hyper Convergence Infrastructure (HCI) is an efficient way to capture and process data because of its inherently high storage efficiency and compute performance,” assures Ron Nash, Chairman and CEO, Pivot3—a company which delivers Global Hyper-Converged Infrastructure for high performance Enterprise IT workloads.

Enterprises initially purchased hyper-converged appliances for a single purpose such as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) or storing massive amounts of video data. But it is when users take advantage of the convergence of storage and compute that the real value of HCI emerges. “Customers who started with a big data storage solution have discovered that they can easily and inexpensively also run a disaster recovery capability on the same HCI. Our technology is a clear differentiator as the HCI is based on a true cross-cluster virtual SAN with extremely high storage efficiency while providing exceptional levels of fault tolerance,” Nash points out. In the process, the Pivot3 architecture preserves compute power through a multitude of optimizations that leave most of the processing capacity for running the user's applications.

The proliferation of networked devices opens the door to many opportunities for useful services that can constitute the core of new business models. The efficiency of the IT infrastructure plays a crucial role to make these services possible. “In the case of the Internet of Things, Pivot3 Global HCI can store, monitor, and process data streams from myriad sensors and devices in an economically viable way which drives down complexity and higher costs,” observes Nash. In addition to improving the performance and availability of high-demand applications, HCI reduces risks associated with multiple vendors, data loss and data security, and provides a centralized management platform, which is designed for simplicity and can be used by any IT generalist.

Pivot3 HCI is an efficient way to capture and process data because of its inherently high storage efficiency and compute performance

One of Pivot3's customers in the healthcare landscape, the National Health Service, leveraged Hyper-convergence to tackle productivity issues arising due to under-performance of devices used to access patient data and bedside information. In partnership with specialized healthcare integrator, Pivot3 installed HCI to support high-performance VDI in the form of mobile medical workstations and thus, delivered a high-end user experience with instant-on availability on any portable device, high end-point security with stateless clients, all at low cost per virtual desktop. Pivot3 not only improved the quality of patient care with improved clinician productivity, key features like secure mobile access meets regulatory compliance and patient privacy laws.

Around the turn of the millennium, the founders of Pivot3 came to the conclusion that the next step in storage technology was to take control of the hardware through software, resulting in the path-breaking vSTAC platform. The trend continues on today at Pivot3’s headquarters in Austin and their innovation lab in Houston, Texas which refines and optimizes the hyper converged software with unique approaches like the close-to-the-metal design, Scalar Erasure Coding, and Virtual Global Sparing, which have led to twenty-two patents filed and awarded to-date. “Having recently announced a joint go-to-market partnership with Lenovo and Arrow ECS in Europe and the Middle East, Pivot3 is expanding their footprint in all geographic areas including Asia-Pacific and Latin America,” concludes Nash.