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.