Pivot3 Enhances Resilience for Large-Scale HCI Deployments With AI and Automation

Pivot3, Inc. added AI and automation features to its Acuity software to address the data protection challenges often faced in large-scale HCI deployments.

These capabilities provide resilience for large multi-petabyte environments, allowing customers who experience catastrophic hardware failures to recover while ensuring HA with auto-healing, quick node rebuild and intelligent monitoring and analytics.

“Customers are increasingly required to manage massive amounts of data generated by video surveillance, both for long term retention and for analysis with video analytics,” said Ben Bolles, VP, product management, Pivot3. “The sheer scale of the infrastructure needed to support these use cases presents new resilience challenges, and organizations are increasingly concerned about capturing, protecting and capitalizing on this mission-critical data. Pivot3 is meeting this growing challenge with new automation and intelligence capabilities to provide customers with peace of mind, knowing their system is resilient, secure and always available.”

At the core of Acuity software platform is the company’s ‘Intelligence Engine’. It comprises many data – and performance-management capabilities, including its market Business Policy Management feature. This enables customers to map business objectives to resource management through simple policies. The firm uses AI and ML to understand application performance, protection and security requirements and to make real-time system changes so SLAs are met. The Intelligence Engine also monitors system health and performs predictive maintenance to ensure maximum system availability. This automates time consuming systems administration and maintenance tasks to reduce operating expenses and to allow organizations to scale without adding additional IT resources.

The company’s Intelligence Engine includes a suite of auto-healing capabilities. Designed to automate human decisions and tasks, the new features replace manual recovery processes by automatically adding a node back to a cluster once it has recovered from a failure. The firm has also introduced a node rebuild feature to reduce repair times up to 90% and to eliminate the need for a time-consuming full node rebuild. This lowers the risk of a second failure.

Other enhancements to the Intelligence Engine include intelligent automation, AI and analytics for proactive system health, configuration optimization and support. These additional system analytics and diagnostics provide customers with improved system health and performance and the ability to automatically share information to the company’s Support cloud. proactive system monitoring flags events in real-time with on-alarm dispatch to the firm’s support and provides daily status reports. AI and ML techniques analyze phone-home data and alert the customer to options if a system is not in compliance with best practices.

“With the real-time system monitoring, Pivot3 Support now alerts my team to unforeseen failures and provides remediation,” said Jeremiah Francis, director, IT, Financial Advocates, Inc. “Additionally, receiving daily system health and configuration status reports allows us to ensure our system is running at peak performance; we can now more easily resolve potential points of failure and optimize for success.“