Breaking out of a niche market can be tough, but Pivot3 is taking that challenge head-on by bringing its scale-out computing and storage platform from the world of digital video surveillance into the data protection market.
The company today announced the availability of the Scale-out Data Protection Platform, which combines the disk, network and compute resources of commodity x86-based servers to create a massive SAN (288TB maximum capacity) that offers linear scaling of performance to support deduplication streams at up to 20TB per hour..
The Pivot3 platform runs embedded Windows or Linux virtual machines (VM) based on theopen-source Xen hypervisor, thereby eliminating the need for physical servers, according to Lee Caswell, founder and chief marketing officer for Pivot3.
“It’s a unique infrastructure platform because it consolidates the server functionality into the storage. If you’re at scale, that’s an instant return on investment because you are running those VMs on the storage,” said Caswell.
Today, the Scale-out Data Protection platform is limited to one VM per appliance, providing each VM with about 4TB of storage capacity. Pivot3 plans to beef up its RAM capacity and VM management capabilities to support more VMs next year.
As for performance, the platform aggregates Gigabit Ethernet links (two per node) for a maximum bandwidth of 24Gbps in a 12 node system.
The platform can sustain as many as five simultaneous drive failures or the failure of an entire node plus three drives via its RAID6 RAIGE (RAID Across Independent Gigabit Ethernet) architecture.
The Scale-out Data Protection platform is currently qualified with products from ten different independent software vendors (ISV) for disk-based backup, recovery, data deduplication, and replication.
Pivot3’s ISV partners for the Scale-out Data Protection platform include Acronis, Asigra, CA, CommVault, Double-take Software, HP, Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager, SteelEye Technology, Symantec, and Zmanda.
Caswell said the company’s growing list of ISV partners is beginning to take the shape of a more “traditional IT ecosystem.”
“[Digital video] surveillance is an offshoot market with its own set of partners. We raised a big chunk of money in March of this year to bring our technology to the IT space,” said Caswell.
Caswell also said the company is looking to double its roster of reseller partners from 50 to 100 as Pivot3 pushes further into the data protection market.
“We help reseller partners generate terrific margins by moving up-market into 100TB SAN opportunities where our consolidated high-availability approach saves end users 40 percent in power and 25 percent in cost,” he said.
Caswell said pricing for the system comes in at less than $1,000 per TB.
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