Pivot3 to Acquire NexGen Storage

AUSTIN, Texas—Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) provider Pivot3 on Jan. 27 announced it will acquire NexGen Storage, a provider of hybrid storage appliances, dynamic all-flash arrays and Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities.

"The addition of NexGen's technology suite broadens Pivot3's hyper-converged offerings, allowing customers to apply the right infrastructure and priority to each data center workload, application or service, including surveillance systems, according to their business value," Pivot3 chief marketing officer Bruce Milne told Security Systems News.

Terms of the deal were not announced.

Milne explained that other storage arrays and hyper-converged systems "treat all data the same,” but NexGen's QoS “governs performance targets, input/output prioritization and data placement, allowing customers to meet business service-level agreements.”

How might this help a physical security integrator?

“The addition of the QoS layer lets us include resource-intensive surveillance workloads in those consolidation plans, which has been a challenge in the past,” Milne said.

By integrating Pivot3's “unique scalar erasure coding capabilities into NexGen's family of high-performance storage devices, customers will get a much lower total cost of ownership on storage than ever before.”

The combined platform or standalone storage product will be able to service mission-critical surveillance applications and supporting workloads—whether business critical or non-critical, he said.

Milne said that all-flash isn't really practical for surveillance yet, but he predicted that the physical security industry “will eventually move to flash storage as prices come down and densities increase.”

However, he said the QoS layer makes a lot of sense for surveillance right now. “It lets IT scale, provision resources and deliver business services and service-level agreements all on the fly, and helps organizations prepare for the move to more software-defined storage solutions while creating opportunities to grow into all-flash and HCI solutions at their own pace.”

Milne noted that surveillance, access control, incident/alarm management and emergency communications are often mission critical. “As organizations move away from closed, proprietary hardware and into the datacenter, QoS capabilities will enable them to maintain high levels of performance in a mixed-workload datacenter without being affected by non-critical applications and vice versa, as we can now prevent resource-intensive surveillance workloads from negatively impacting other critical applications.”

Milne said an estimated 1,300 petabytes of critically important video data is created every day. “Organizations need to figure out how to incorporate video into the datacenter without impacting other operations. Pivot3's QoS capabilities puts organizations on that path, not only accommodating these workloads but optimizing them to achieve the best performance alongside other business critical and non-critical apps as they transition.”

Pivot3's expanded portfolio will work with small, distributed sites or large centralized implementations in a datacenter, Milne said.

Physical security integrators will have “more options to architect solutions that quickly adapt to the changing IT landscape and emerging business challenges posed by the advances in video surveillance technology,” Milne said.

Will new storage solutions require more training for physical security integrators? Milne said the answer is likely yes, but that Pivot3 can help integrators “modernize their business and keep them relevant in an increasingly IT-centric industry.”