Pivot3: Backup and DR Within Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Appliance

Pivot3, Inc. announced the availability of its Hyper-Converged DR Appliance (HCDRA).

The solution is designed as a appliance that secures vital company digital assets and quickly deploys business critical applications in a pay-as-you-grow model.

HCDRAs support fast, flexible and reliable backup and recovery of virtualized applications and data, and are based on Pivot3’s Globally Hyper-Converged Infrastructure technology. HCDRAs combine storage and compute resources within the same appliance. In case of a DR event, data recovery can be performed within the same rack of appliances. Critical operations can be resumed without the need for separate recovery servers making HCDRAs a particularly cost-effective solution.

HCDRAs leverage Pivot3’s patented Scalar Erasure Coding technology to deliver storage efficiency, with up to 94% of total installed capacity effectively available for storage in a 16-node array. The result can save customers more than 25% versus conventional enterprise architecture options for backup. Storage efficiency increases with each added appliance while maintaining fault tolerance capable of withstanding simultaneous failure of an entire appliance and two HDDs.

The company’s technology partners deliver simple-to-deploy DR solutions with data center availability software such as CommVault, Veeam or Zerto running directly on HCDRAs to replicate critical data, providing five-nines reliability and multi-fault protection at a competitive price point.

“Four of our customers have chosen to install their preferred DR software on Pivot3 hyper-converged infrastructure appliances,” said Andy CK Yoon, CEO, CDIT, Korea. “They chose Pivot3 because of the ease of deployment, the high percentage of total storage capacity available for backup and for the fact that they can perform recovery operations from the same box.“

Unifying the compute and the storage enables rapid restoration of critical systems without building a farm of idle servers waiting for a recovery event.

“We’ve enabled the same systems to act as backup recipients and the solution to restore workloads when needed,” said Michael Richtberg, VP product strategy, Pivot3.

“Pivot3’s hyper-converged system combines servers and storage in a single platform. The system also stores large amounts of data, while using disk capacity very efficiently, thanks to its erasure-coding mechanism. These two qualities promise a single DR platform that eliminates the need for separate recovery servers, while storing high volumes of backup data – without the capacity overheads imposed by the replication mechanisms used in other hyper-converged systems,” said Tim Stammers, 451 Research.

In the era of continuous business operations, cutting-edge DR solutions enable IT to achieve fast recovery time RTO) and RPOs for all applications and data. The combination of Pivot3 fault tolerant and storage efficient HCDRAs with the customer’s preferred DR software ensures that IT can deliver on the promise of the 24/7 data center

With Globally Hyper-Converged Infrastructure technology, DR backup and recovery software running on a VMWare eSXi VM can access all resources from all HCDRAs in a cluster, including: a common pool of RAM cache, aggregated capacity of HDD storage (Pivot3 virtual SAN), and aggregated SSD storage, for maximum backup performance.

Hyper-converged infrastructure technology was originally designed to tackle large-scale continuous backup in an environment where storage experts are rarely on hand. As a result, HCDRAs are scale-out appliances that can closely match the needs of a growing business by allowing the gradual addition of new cluster-aware nodes, which require no advanced storage expertise.

“Our HCI technology’s flexibility has enabled us to develop a backup and DR platform that is simple-to-deploy and manage with almost any DR software package,” said Mike Dunbar, global VP sales and GM enterprise group, Pivot3. “With high usable capacity, five-nines availability and a scale-out building block appliance, the Pivot3 solution provides backup and recovery for on-premise backup or DR site replication for medium- to enterprise installations at a very attractive price point.“