Pivot3 Hyper-Converged Solution for Lenovo Clients

Pivot3, Inc., in the development of hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), and Lenovo Enterprise Solutions, Pte Ltd. have partnered to bring Pivot3’s hyper-converged solution to Lenovo clients.

ARROW Enterprise Computing Solutions (ARROW ECS) will be the exclusive distributor of this platform in Europe, expanding a long-standing relationship. The combined solution will be sold as the ‘Hyper-Converged ONE’ appliance initially leveraging a performance Lenovo all-flash platform and will be at first focused on the European market.

“The combined Lenovo/Pivot3 solution will deliver a powerful, efficient and easily scalable data centre solution to our customers,” said Guy England, director, Lenovo’s enterprise business group. “This partnership brings Lenovo clients a leading hyper-converged offering and will provide a scalable and flexible solution to unify and optimize the storage and compute power needed to deliver a superior user experience and excellent price-performance.“

Pivot3’s hyper-convergence solution breaks the trade-off between available storage capacity and data protection by pooling all resources across a cluster. Through Pivot3’s patented Scalar Erasure Coding, customers benefit from hight level of fault tolerance while benefiting from storage and compute efficiencies. These result in a cost per terabyte and per IO/s lower than that achieved by merely locally hyper-convergence vendors.

The Pivot3/Lenovo platform will be sold through Arrow ECS and its channel partners, giving them access to Pivot3’s HCI offering and the ability to deliver a scalable solution to current and new customers. Channel partners will benefit from a training and certification program that includes marketing support, sales enablement and promotional programs.

The partnership with Arrow ECS takes the Lenovo ThinkServer RD650 Server, installs Pivot3’s HCI software and creates a hyper-converged appliance. The integration of Pivot3’s vSTAC OS software and Lenovo’s ThinkServer RD650 server will enable Lenovo appliance users to get storage efficiency, fault tolerance and higher compute performance, all with single pane of glass management while delivering lower TCO.

“This OEM partnership greatly expands Pivot3’s reach with an exciting solution for Lenovo’s customers and will provide enhanced go-to-market capabilities, lead generation, sales, service support, marketing and events,” said Ron Nash, CEO, Pivot3. “Combining Lenovo’s hardware with Pivot3’s hyper-converged solutions and Arrow’s market reach will create a powerful offering in this competitive and fast-growing marketplace. Our joint solution will allow Lenovo’s channel partners to deliver an advanced, full-featured solution to their customers.“

For Arrow ECS, the partnership is a great way to bring hyper-converged infrastructure to one of the growing segments of the IT market and satisfy the need for businesses to scale IT infrastructure. The combined Pivot3/Lenovo solution will change the economics of the data center via its ‘scale as you grow’ model.

As data center customers tackle levels of infrastructure complexity, approaches and technologies such as Pivot3’s platform are taking center stage as an alternative to stand-alone hardware and traditional converged systems. A shift is occurring, and legacy storage platforms are seeing their markets pivot to hyper-converged platforms from a wide – and growing – roster of vendors.

Hyper-converged infrastructure is one of the fastest growing segments of the hardware market as executives are increasingly seeking ways to sharpen their offerings for the future. According to the Technology Business Research, Inc.’s 2015 Data Center Predictions report, hardware companies are looking for ‘software-infused hardware innovation’ and are going after companies that are ‘currently shaping the markets of software-defined networking, software-defined storage and hyper-converged servers.’

TBR’s 1Q15 Hyper-converged Platforms Market Landscape report estimates the global hyper-converged platforms market will grow at a five-year CAGR of 71.6% from 2013 to 2018, compared to a five-year CAGR of 18.4% for the overall converged infrastructure market.