Pivot3’s hyperconverged infrastructure software has been certified to run on Cisco Systems’ integrated data center solutions.
Company officials announced Aug. 23 that the company’s vSTAC OS software has been given compatibility certification with Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) and UCS Mini computing platforms, a move that gives Pivot3 another avenue for selling its software into the rapidly growing hyperconverged infrastructure market.
Pivot3 is ramping up its portfolio since its acquisition earlier this year of storage software provider NexGen, which brought with it accelerated flash array and quality-of-service (QoS) technologies. In June, the company unveiled the first product resulting from the acquisition, the vSTAC SLX, and earlier this month added more QoS features to its hyperconverged offerings.
With the Cisco certification, Pivot3 officials boast that the company’s architecture eliminates the need for an external SAN because it provides up to 84 percent usable capacity within the blades contained in the USC Mini. By using solid-state drives (SSDs) from Cisco, Pivot3’s software can deliver up to 41TB of usable storage on 16 blades, they said. A combined Cisco-Pivot3 offering not only eliminates the cost of an external SAN, it also reduces rack space and power, cooling and administrative costs.
“Our certification on the Cisco USC and UCS Mini platforms means we can provide customers with increased agility to scale capacity and performance quickly and easily while reducing costs in the data center,” Pivot3 CEO Ron Nash said in a statement.
Pivot3 received the certification through Cisco’s Solution Partner Program, in which the networking giant supports third parties as they work to certify their products with Cisco offerings. News of Pivot3’s certification comes a week after officials with rival Nutanix announced that the company had independently validated its software to run on some of Cisco’s UCS systems, which offer tightly integrated compute, storage, networking, virtualization and management software in a single appliance.
Nutanix has an OEM agreement with Lenovo and Dell to run its software on hyperconverged systems from those vendors. However, the company doesn’t have a similar agreement with Cisco, and the validation reportedly was not done with Cisco’s help. Nutanix created a system that enables it to quickly develop software changes to respond to UCS hardware updates, officials said.
Cisco has not commented on Nutanix’s validation work.