Testing on Pivot3 Next-Generation Acuity HCI Platform

Pivot3, Inc., in hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions for the software-defined datacenter, revealed results of the first phase of comparison testing on its Acuity HCI platform.

Tests were conducted in Pivot3’s labs and in customer environments, and showed Acuity’s superior performance, density and response time compared to competitor solutions. The results come in conjunction with the release of the latest version of Acuity, 2.1.1, which adds extended capabilities and greater support for graphics-intensive environments.

Following its launch in April 2017, Acuity was compared against conventional HCI solutions throughout a three-month period, using industry-standard test tools and similar workloads on similarly-configured HCI systems, while also referencing public data for comparison.

This research and testing revealed that Acuity provides: 

• Six times the overall performance, giving customers the confidence to consolidate mixed-application workloads and lower overall costs.
• Two to three times VDI user density per node (based on Login VSI testing) with 25% less hardware, allowing Pivot3 to lower the cost per user by 44% over conventional HCI vendors.
• 62% faster response times and nine times faster processing of IO/s at sub-millisecond latencies.
• Faster application response time, even under heavy workloads, results in more satisfied end-users, increases revenue and fosters greater employee productivity.
• 46% more TPC-C transactions per minute resulting in up to 47% lower cost per transaction. Highly-transactional application workloads deliver maximum performance, with lower cost per transaction.

Acuity is a priority-aware HCI solution that combines an NVMe flash data path with an advanced QoS engine, enabling IT to confidently consolidate mixed application workloads onto a common infrastructure. The latest version of Acuity also includes greater support for graphics-intensive VDI with density and performance-optimized NVIDIA Tesla GPUs and support for higher RAM capacity in the Acuity nodes to drive application density. HCI has proved itself as a good platform for VDI environments, and this release will allow customers to deliver a great VDI user experience along with accelerating time to deploy and lowering the TCO by achieving higher user densities using Acuity for graphics-intensive VDI.

“We’re very impressed with the results we’re seeing from Acuity. The solution is NVMe and sits right on the PCIe bus, plus it’s already four times faster than what we currently have in our environment,” said Phil Lisk, CIO, Bergen County Sheriff’s Office. “The QoS layer changes the game for us. With improved performance, simple scalability and the ability to reduce our footprint while running more workloads, including our mission critical applications, we know we will get guaranteed performance out of those applications and we can do more with less.“

“We’re bullish on Acuity because it responds to our clients’ growing demand for hyperconverged systems that can support broader ranges of workloads on a single platform,” said Steward Sonneland, principle and CEO, Strategic Integrators, Inc. “The combination of Pivot3’s mature, policy-based QoS engine with the accelerated performance of ultra-low latency NVMe PCIe flash is really attractive to our clients who require multiple, mixed application workloads with higher VM densities. This means they’re achieving solid economic advantages, benefiting from a far easier environment to manage with higher end-user satisfaction. Finally, we love the fact that Pivot3’s configuration and pricing model is designed to support a wide range of customer requirements, allowing clients to start small and grow as their business warrants. Pivot3’s performance advantage often allows us to price a deal lower than the competition, since it requires less hardware to do the same job. It’s a pretty incredible solution.“

“As more organizations start to use HCI to support core datacenter functions, it will become increasingly important to provide the highest level of performance and support for broader application workload management,” said Ron Nash, CEO, Pivot3. “Acuity is the fastest, simplest and smartest HCI available, and we are thrilled to see so many customers reaping its many benefits. As adoption increases and customers progress closer to a software-defined datacenter, Acuity will be there to deliver greater business value and meet the evolving needs of IT.“