Start-Up’s Profile: Pivot3

Company
Pivot3, Inc.
 
Headquarters and offices
HQs in Austin, TX; development center in Spring, TX; solution center in Palo Alto, CA, regional offices in Vermont Gate, Derby, UK and Dubai, UAE.

Founded in
2003

Financial funding
In February 2012, closed $23 million round, led by Samsung Ventures, and participated in by existing investors: Focus Ventures, InterWest Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mesirow Financial, Northleaf Capital Partners and Silver Creek Ventures. Total funding to date: $100.5 million.

Main executives

• Richard Bravman, CEO, since last November replacing Bob Fernander, was most recently VP, corporate development and CMO for NCR, after being chairman and CEO of Intelleflex. His career began in software engineering as the fifth employee at Symbol Technologies finishing as vice chairman and CEO.
• Bill Galloway, founder and CTO, is named on 24 storage patents and has been involved in storage technologies and standards such as SAS, SATA, SCSI, FC, and RAID. Prior to Pivot3, he was co-founder of BREA Technologies, a private storage technology company after working at Compaq as a principal member of the technical staff where he architected and developed products for storage hardware and software.
• Lee Caswell, founder and CSO, was EVP marketing and business development at VMware and held senior management roles at Adaptec, ending as VP and GM of its $350 million Storage Solutions Group.
• Olivier Thierry, CMO, served as CMO for Zenoss. He was also CMO for Mission Critical Software/NetIQ.
• Deborah MacCallum, VP engineering, held senior-level positions at EMC, where she worked on cloud-based systems, and was formerly VP engineering at Voyence, acquired by EMC. She also served as VP of development and co-founder at SilverBack Technologies, purchased by Dell.
• Curt Wittich, VP and GM sales, Americas, held VP roles with Pillar Data Systems and of senior management positions during his tenure with HDS, ending as SVP and GM, Americas.

Number of employees
75

Technology and products

Company’s unified storage and computing software platform is called vSTAC OS that creates scale-out SAN across a network of commodity x86 appliances. It also unifies server virtualization creating a single converged appliance for both storage and servers.

vSTAC appliances are pre-configured for vertical markets. Integrated with vSTAC OS and other third party software applications, they create an application specific appliance for target applications (video surveillance, VDI) .

vSTAC Watch appliances for video surveillance
The vSTAC OS simultaneously runs VMS (video management system) archiving applications in virtual server environments and creates, protects and load balances IP SAN capacity and performance across all the drives, solid state, network and RAID resources contained within the 12TB, 24TB or 36TB appliances in the vSTAC Watch Array.

Each appliance contributes a VMware ESXi virtual server environment with dedicated local compute resources as well as IP SAN resources that are shared across the entire vSTAC. Each vSTAC contains from three to twelve vSTAC Watch appliances and can be expanded on the fly.

Appliance hardware specs:

• Dual quad-core Intel Xeon CPUs
• 12GB RAM
• 4 GbE LAN NICs
• Integrated VMware ESXi hypervisor
• 2 write-cache SSDs
• 12 enterprise SATA 2.0 HDDs
• 2GE iSCSI ports
• 128 physical or virtual iSCSI initiators
• 128 dynamically expandable volumes
• 50GB flash accelerator

vSTAC Watch specs:

• Dynamic storage scaling: Dynamic logical and physical capacity expansion; dynamic disk and RAID controller load-balancing; dynamic iSCSI multi-path and load-balancing
• Stack specs: 3 to 12 appliances in a vSTAC Array; scale to 432TB iSCSI SAN, 720MB/s ingest rate, 12 parallel RAID controllers, 600GB flash accelerator
• Virtual server protection: Pivot3 VM Failover for high availability; no separate licenses to purchase; no dedicated hardware to deploy; optional vMotion, HA and other VMware software sold separately through VMware reseller partners
• Storage protection: No single point of failure; distributed virtual sparing; predictive drive sparing; multi-path protection for iSCSI connections; RAID 6x (5 simultaneous disk events, or 2 drives and an entire appliance); RAID 6e (3 simultaneous disk events, or 1 drive and an entire appliance); RAID 5e (1 disk event, or an entire appliance)

For VDI:
vSTAC VDI is a solution for SMBs looking for a VMware View-based VDI. vSTAC VDI appliances unify storage and servers eliminating the need for IT expertise required to configure and integrate separate SAN storage, servers and software into a VDI solution. It uses commodity hardware with a pay-as-you-grow appliance model.

A Pivot3 vSTAC P Cubed appliance is a pre-configured, VMware starter appliance with all of the View and Microsoft software components pre-installed and configured to run up to 100 desktops. Certified as part of VMware’s Rapid Desktop Program, a vSTAC P Cubed appliance speeds up and simplifies View Pilots. A 100 desktop View pilot deployment can be completed in less than one hour, according to the company.  

Features of vSTAC VDI:

• Server: dual six-core Xeon X5675; 96GB RAM; two 10 GbE SFP+ for LAN and iSCSCI connectivity; integrated VMware vSphere 5.0 hypervisor
• Storage: 50GB SLC write-cache flash; 150GB SLC flash tier; 3TB SAS tier; storage resources scale-out as appliances are added
• Scaling specs: stack 3 to 8 appliances in a vSTAC Array, hundreds of virtual servers, 24TB iSCSI SAN, 8 parallel RAID controllers
• Virtual server protection: VMware vMotion, VMware HA, optional VMware vCenter-Facilitates administration
• Storage protection: no single point of failure, distributed virtual sparing, predictive drive sparing, multi-path protection for iSCSI connections, RAID 6x, RAID 6e, RAID 5e and RAID 1P (triple mirroring for SLC SSD tier)
• Management software: vSTAC Manager configures vSTAC Arrays and runs on any PC

Released date
2008 (Cloudbank)

Price range
From $10,000 to $45,000 per appliance depending on capacity

Software partners
Aimetis, Avigilon, Axis, BriefCam, Cameramanager, CASD, Controlware, Detexi, DVTEL, exacq, foxstream, Genetec, Griffid, Immersive Media, IndigoVision, Insight, IpConfigure, IPVision, IronSky, ISS, Iveda Solutions, KaoLab, Lenel, March, Milestone, Mirasys, NICE, OnSSI, Pelco, Safety Vision,Salient Systems, SCATI, Vaelsys, Verint, Viasys, VideoInsight, VMware

Hardware partners
Arecont Vision, Arktan Systems, Axis, Basler, Dell, Firetide, IQinvision, Mobotix, Panasonic, Pelco, Proxim, Samsung, Sony

Distribution
100 partners and integrators. vSTAC is distributed by Tech Data, Dell Software and Peripherals and Building Zones.

≠ of customers
500 in government agencies, law enforcement, gaming, railways, hospitals, ports, airports, education, retail. Among customers in video surveillance: Choctaw Casinos, The 101 Casino, Chumash Casino, Chinook Winds Casino Resort, Silverton Hotel and Casino, City of Maple Grove, Long Beach PD, Paterson PD, Placer County PD, Rochester PD, Tampa Sheriffs, SeaTac Airport, Specs Fine Foods Retail, Pine Crest School, Muskogee Community Hospital, Mall of America, Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, Hillsborough County Sheriff, City of Trenton and Trenton Police Department

≠ of systems sold
3,500

Competitors
DNF Security, Intransa, Rasilent, Seneca, VideoIQ, storage vendors like Aberdeen, EMC/Iomega, Qnap, Synology or Thecus, and vertically integrated suppliers