Pivot3, a pioneer and innovator in the development of hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), today announced that it will acquire NexGen Storage, a privately held leading provider of hybrid storage appliances, dynamic all-flash arrays and Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities. By adding NexGen’s portfolio of products, Pivot3 will deliver the industry's most complete set of dynamic hyper-converged solutions. For the first time ever, enterprise and mid-market companies will have access to a suite of solutions that will allow them to apply the right infrastructure and priority to each workload, application or business service according to business value.

By adding NexGen’s strengths in accelerated all-flash and hybrid storage, Pivot3 is uniquely expanding the traditional notion of hyper-convergence. Now, customers have complete implementation flexibility and QoS management, so IT no longer has to overprovision for peak workloads, but instead can use just-in-time dynamic provisioning of resources and scale as the business grows. Pivot3 intends to market and enhance all current and planned NexGen products.

“Everyone talks about the need for agility in terms of business needs, but in hyper-convergence, workload utilization and performance have been gating factors to expansion beyond the usual initial use cases,” said Ron Nash, CEO of Pivot3. “With the addition of NexGen’s capabilities, Pivot3 is now the only company in the market that broadly and deeply addresses this central data center challenge with a solution that allows IT to prioritize application performance based on business priority. We believe this agility is critical as customers move from legacy data centers to a software-defined data center that effortlessly handles a heterogeneous set of workloads. We welcome the NexGen customers, partners and team to Pivot3.”

Unlike other storage arrays and hyper-converged systems that treat all data the same, NexGen’s dynamic QoS governs performance targets, input/output (I/O) prioritization and data placement, allowing customers to meet business service-level agreements. For example, an organization serving the healthcare market can prioritize mission-critical hospital system applications over the internal Microsoft Exchange server, preventing a surge in employee email downloads from interrupting life-or-death health care system operations.

“We categorize all of our applications as mission-critical, business-critical or non-critical,” said Michael Frank, manager IT services group, NCS Credit. “We need our systems to be able to recognize that not all applications are created equal and to process them appropriately and differentially.”

“Not all data should be treated the same; the growing momentum of the Internet of Things (IoT), together with ever-increasing user-expectations and application-demands, means there is a pressing need for HCI platforms that are optimally built to manage the onslaught of disparate data,” said Mark Peters, practice director and senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). “Pivot3’s new approach offers precisely this with its hyper-converged solution-suite; it includes compelling differentiations which enable it to support more extensive and expansive use cases by delivering increased and optimized value from the data it manages.”

Dynamic hyper-convergence provides enterprises with a practical and proven path to extend the economics and simplicity of HCI to all business services, effectively enabling the first generation of software-defined data centers. Pivot3 provides HCI, hybrid and all-flash storage in appliance and blade form factors. Their patented Scalar Erasure Coding gives their HCI technology the ability to yield up to 94 percent usable storage, and their all-flash HCI appliances are specifically designed to provide maximum input/output operations per second (IOPS) for high-performance applications. Combined with NexGen’s proven QoS and dynamic provisioning capabilities, high-performance hybrid storage and all-flash form factors, Pivot3 now provides the most extensive suite of HCI solutions available in the market.

“We’re proud of our rich history and our reputation as a leader in new technology storage products, and we see enormous synergies in bringing together these two innovative businesses,” said John Spiers, founder and CEO of NexGen. “The pedigrees of our teams in the storage and high-performance computing markets are unparalleled in the industry. Combining these powerful teams and innovative solutions gives our customers and partners an incredible advantage in their respective markets.”

Pivot3 executed a definitive agreement to acquire NexGen following the unanimous approval of the Boards of Directors of Pivot3 and NexGen. The transaction is expected to close in February 2016.