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Pivot3 officials want to bring its hypercoverged technologies to smaller organizations and remote enterprise offices.
The company this week launched the Edge Office, an appliance that gives small and midsize businesses (SMBs) and remote and branch offices of enterprises the same simplicity, scalability and efficiencies that larger companies gain by embracing hyperconverged infrastructures. That includes pool storage resources, VMware-based virtualization capabilities, data protection, disaster recovery and high resource utilization.
“Edge Office brings Pivot3’s industry-leading performance, resiliency and efficiency to SMB and [remote and branch office] environments,” Ben Bolles, vice president of product management at Pivot3, said in a statement, adding that the new product “will support the next wave of HCI adoption.”
Pivot3 is one of a growing number of players in the fast-growing hyperconverged infrastructure space. Where converged infrastructure offerings bring together compute, storage, networking, virtualization and management software into a single appliance, hyperconverged takes the next step by integrating compute and storage functionality into a single, highly virtualized server-based solution.
Organizations are seeing their data centers become increasingly complex as they deal with such trends as cloud computing, data analytics, the proliferation of mobile devices and the rise of the internet of things (IoT). Highly integrated, virtualized and easy-to-deploy hyperconverged solutions are designed to simplify data centers by making them easier and less costly to manage.
A broad array of data center hardware makers are pushing into the hyperconverged space, and vendors like Pivot3, Nutanix and SimpliVity are offerings software that can run on their or third-party hardware. They market last year for hyperconverged infrastructure was a $981.91 million market, according to IDC analysts. By 2019, it is expected to increase to more than $4.7 billion. Gartner analysts expect the space to reach $2 billion this year, and almost $5 billion by 2019. In the second quarter, hyperconverged technologies generated $480.62 million in revenue, a 137.5 percent increase over the same period last year, according to IDC.
The industry got a boost when Nutanix last month raised $238 million via an initial public offering.
Pivot3 officials said SMBs and remote offices can benefit from having appliances that not only offers integrated compute, storage and a, hyperconverged operating system, but also support. Smaller offices tend to have small IT staffs that run everything applications and infrastructure systems to security and data protection. In addition, enterprises with multiple remote and branch offices need the ability to have a single IT generalist managing multiple sites.
Pivot3’s Edge Office is designed to give smaller companies the same functionality as their larger brethren. It includes enterprise-class storage that aggregates the capacity from each node in a pool for resources, Pivot3’s vSTAC operating system, which consumes less than 10 percent of the resources on the system, and virtualization based on VMware’s ESXi hypervisor and managed through the vCenter Server interface. There also is advanced fault tolerance, data protection and disaster recovery capabilities.
Edge Office, which is available now, also comes with three years of hardware and software support. The appliance comes in modular nodes, with reach ranging from 1.6TB to 6.4TB of storage capacity, and the nodes are sued to create clusters that are capable of scaling to more than 38TB of capacity available to all virtual machines and applications running on the cluster.