Pivot3 Expands Video Surveillance RAID Portfolio

Pivot3, Inc., supplier of IP SANs to the physical security market, announced two new core products and enhancements to its full suite of scalable storage solutions today.

The Pivot3 MiniBank server individually handles up to 70 cameras with 2 – 8TB of RAID storage supporting VMS applications from more than 30 open systems partners. MiniBanks are easily configured together to support larger camera counts with up to 48TB of shared SAN storage and embedded VMS failover protection. It is designed for distributed environments typically found in retail, financial, educational and corporate markets.

Pivot3 also unveiled the HardBank server, a ruggedized version of the MiniBank that is ideal for military, air-constrained and mobile applications that experience harsh environments with extreme dust, vibration and heat.

The HardBank and MiniBank are both powered by the latest Intel Nehalem CPUs, which double VMS performance through the use of hyper-threading and pipelining. Both products are backed by Pivot3 world-class service and support, configuration assistance, and a three-year warranty.

"Pivot3 is well-known as the standard for high-capacity casino customers with large camera counts," said Mitch Bolnick, CEO of BCD Low Voltage Systems. "But we needed a Pivot3 product for the smaller surveillance system installations that comprise a big percentage of our business. The MiniBank fills that void and in turn, propels our business opportunities."

Recent market research from IMS Research, titled The World Market for Enterprise and IP Storage Used for Video Surveillance – 2010 Ed., reported the retail and financial vertical markets are two of the fastest growing markets for enterprise IP storage for the Americas. The new MiniBank and HardBank servers reach new, lower price points and further reduce reseller field costs with a self-healing architecture and application failover protection. End users benefit from the investment protection inherent in the scale-out appliance model so that systems can be easily scaled over time with a pay-as-you-grow model.

"We have a hungry development team that continues to bite off technical challenges that matter to customers," said Lee Caswell, Founder and Chief Marketing Officer, Pivot3. "We started out in the high-end of the market and now we are making our technology more accessible with smaller form factors, lower price points and features that protect users and simplify reseller support."

The company also announced that a new Surveillance Feature Pack would be included free of charge with all systems. The Feature Pack includes RAID 6x, which protects data in the case of five simultaneous drive failures; a Recording Interruption Alarm that alerts users if displayed video is not being recorded; and Predictive Drive Sparing, which pre-emptively identifies bad drives before they fail.

"We believe Pivot3 solutions are the most reliable and feature-rich in the industry today. As more customers transition to IP-based technology, the demand for robust, cost-effective and reliable storage solutions increases exponentially," said Paul Zucker, CTO, Avrio RMS Group. "With these enhancements, we can now leverage the power of the Pivot3 product family for both large and small IP deployments."

The MiniBank and HardBank will be the company’s first products offered through distribution.