Recently, I had the pleasure of attending an analyst briefing with Ben Bolles, Vice President of Products; and Mike Koponen, Senior Director, Product Marketing and Strategic Alliances, at Pivot3 discussing their latest launch. It was interesting to see the advances in the hyperconverged infrastructure space and the differentiation Pivot3 is bringing to market.
When we look at Pivot3’s core areas, it is clear they are competing in a large market, but they keep the focus on video surveillance. This is a market segment that is clearly gaining adoption, not only at the data center core but also at the edge and in the cloud.
Pivot3 Focus Areas
Building on their platform, Pivot3 is looking to expand into areas where they are already innovating. This includes health and best practices analyzers, auto-healing/quick node rebuild automation, automated upgrade orchestration, fully documented REST API, and automated GPU failover.
So Where Is Pivot3 Headed?
Like many vendors, Pivot3 is promising an easy and innovative approach with purpose-built delivery to support physical security environments. So what does this mean?
According to Bolles, Pivot3’s areas of innovation will focus on:
- Pre-engineered solutions: packaged solutions for easier delivery.
- Software-based intelligence: adding advances with Pivot3 Acuity.
- Edge solutions: to process and deliver results at the edge.
- Unified management: managing Pivot3 and non-Pivot3 infrastructure with Pivot3 Surety.
The Pivot3 Surety management application monitors and manages the entire ecosystem through software. This also includes an innovative approach to virtualize anywhere and to any device, which is an interesting and cool way to address virtualization.
The following image outlines the complete management ecosystem.
Pivot3 Management Ecosystem
Another advancement that Bolles highlighted is that Pivot3 Surety provides support of multiple Pivot3 and non-Pivot3 devices managed alongside one another in the management dashboard. This “single pane of glass” adds value to the ecosystem because Pivot3 Surety unified management tracks video retention, analytics of CPU utilization, storage performance and replacement characteristics, and service tag data. Pivot3 Surety is included with the Pivot3 systems but is also available as a subscription service with non-Pivot3 offerings.
Solving Problems at the Edge
The edge is expanding. Storing at-scale video data wherever it resides is often expensive and complex, and the ability to access and extract video data at the edge is highly desirable. But managing and deploying edge at scale is difficult. Pivot3 aims to take on these challenges with this launch. With this release, video recording and video analytics are key to the core and edge use cases. Adding centralized management, remote monitoring, upgrade orchestration, and security offer solutions to these challenges.
A couple of additional areas to consider with this Pivot3 launch are the new purpose-built edge solution and pre-engineered solutions. Lots of advancements come with this announcement, and I look forward to seeing where this will take Pivot3 in the near and long term.
