Pivot3 Unveiling Converged Blade vSTAC Appliance

Pivot3, Inc. announced its Hyper-Converged Blade Appliance, a solution that simplifies modular VDI deployments for customers who want to achieve enterprise scalability with a large number of users without the increased complexity and cost of external storage architectures.

The blade appliance uses Pivot3’s vSTAC OS to define and control a common pool of storage capacity for all VMs, and to create a hyper-converged infrastructure that seamlessly fuses storage, compute and networking resources for a high-quality desktop experience

When implemented with Dell M820 Blades, the blade appliance delivers increased density resulting in a reduced physical footprint with lower rack space requirements while achieving maximum performance and protection for dynamically scaled desktop deployments. It uses the inherent energy efficiency of blades to support sustainable business practices with lower energy usage and lower cooling needs.

Benefits of Pivot3 vSTAC HCIA blade-based appliance:

• Supports up to 10,000 virtual desktops in a single rack, 4x density improvement over conventional servers. This smaller footprint makes scale-out operations more efficient.
• Combines compute, networking and storage resources into a single, efficient, self-contained structure. There are no storage bottlenecks with Pivot3’s grid connected local storage.
• Maximizes CPU, memory and network utilization rates of the blade array as the Pivot3 platform dynamically aggregates, load-balances and optimizes storage, compute and network resources ensuring optimal performance.
• Delivers up to 20% reduction in energy costs through power saving efficiency of the blade design.
• Combines the scale-out flexibility of hyper-converged solutions with the investment protection of blades.

Buy as you grow
Pivot3’s entry in the VDI market with its vSTAC appliances, more than two years ago, has generated strong interest from users intent on harnessing the full power of virtualization.

The vSTAC R2S P-Cubed starter appliance was introduced to allow organizations to deploy a pilot environment of 100+ desktops in under one hour, while eliminating the storage sizing and configuration challenges commonly associated with VDI deployments.

The solution is designed for scaling through simple addition of vSTAC R2S appliances. The fail-safe nature of the vSTAC technology and the single point of control administration presents compelling value for VDI users.

“With the roll-out of the hyper-converged blade appliance, Pivot3 effectively delivers VDI to users for whom an investment in blades is a good fit. Vastly larger organizations can now experience the benefits of the vSTAC R2S appliance but in a denser hardware configuration that is more economical to operate while supporting up to tens of thousands of desktops,” said Mike Dunbar, VP of Pivot3’s hyper-converged solutions business. “Our new blade appliance offers peace of mind to customers who administer massive desktop deployments. Our automatic re-allocation of hyper-converged resources allows for multiple drive failures or even complete compute node failures with rapid reparation as components come back online. Quite simply, we are a much more capacity efficient virtual SAN.”

With vSTAC hyper-converged appliances, all storage and performance resources are shared across the virtual desktops, but with the ultimate protection of HA for compute, network, and storage. Unlike alternative architectures that require anticipation of future growth when buying conventional shared storage, Pivot3 deployments elastically grow as workloads increase simply by adding additional appliances. Customers can their limit investment to the capacity they need right now when initiating a VDI project; changes in desktop usage are seamlessly and economically accommodated as needs grow. Pivot3’s technology load balances, manages and converges all hosting resources.

Increased ROI and lower TCO
Pivot3 solutions improve IT efficiency. The blade appliance concept decreases the time it takes to architect, plan and manage a virtual desktop environment, specifically for high-volume applications. The solution automates routine IT tasks, leaving more time for higher value IT work. Additionally, the vSTAC OS improves storage efficiency by providing up to 92% usable storage capacity as compared to 50% or less in other hyper-converged infrastructures.

The blade appliance is managed by the vSTAC OS software, which runs on the hypervisor, converging all the blade resources across the cluster to provide maximum system availability. The OS creates a common storage pool, which distributes data and volume across all storage resources in the cluster. Distribute erasure coding calculates parity internally to each blade and distributes across the cluster to protect against storage failures in a more efficient manner than other scale-out appliances that only offer replication.

“We’ve designed our vSTAC OS to dynamically adapt the storage required for desktop virtualization workloads, while simplifying deployment and enhancing the user experience,” said Bill Galloway, CTO and co-founder, Pivot3. “For blade-based, high-density virtual desktop installations, the Pivot3 vSTAC HCIA blade appliance provides an extremely cost-effective and easy-to-deploy solution that meets the needs of current and future VDI environments.“

Pivot3 blade appliances leverage latest release of vSTAC OS, which includes:

• ElastiCache employing 4-64GB RAM and SSD flash tier for read and write caching
• Building block modular scalability
• Automatically load balances, protects and aggregates resources across the array and across desktops sharing all resources at all times
• Maintenance and software upgrade experience. If an appliance is taken offline, VM’s migrate to an available space and continue to function with no downtime.

Pivot3 will be at VMworld in San Francisco, CA.