Pivot3 to target Azure, Google clouds and enhance AI/ML

Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) maker Pivot3 plans to expand cloud virtual editions beyond Amazon Web Services (AWS) to Azure and Google Cloud Platform. It also plans additions and adjustments to its Acuity hyper-converged hardware and enhancements based around artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to its HCI product software.

That’s according to product marketing director Mike Koponen, who outlined some items on the roadmap for the US company this week.

Pivot3 made its name with hyper-converged products aimed at the video surveillance market, but has increasingly targeted small to medium-sized enterprises (SME) and datacentres.

This time last year it made its first foray towards hybrid cloud operations, with the announcement of Pivot3 Cloud Edition, which allows Pivot3 backups to be run in AWS.

Currently, the policy-based management engine in Pivot3 on-site hyper-converged deployments can provide a backup target via an Amazon Machine Image in the AWS public cloud. Next will come the ability to target Pivot3 backups at Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

Koponen said he “couldn’t commit on the exact timeframe” for the introduction of that capability, but said it would be in the “foreseeable future”.

A key emphasis for Pivot3 in the coming period will be to add further AI/ML intelligence to its vSTAC operating environment.

Koponen said this would likely be, for example, to allow Pivot3 hardware to take advantage of new layers of storage – such as NVDIMM and 3D Xpoint – so they can form part of tiering and caching in quality-of-service policy setting.

That’s in addition to the ability currently to set quality-of-service profiles for workloads that allocate IOPS, throughput, RAM, flash, NVMe card and disk usage by workload.

Pivot3 offers Acuity hyper-converged infrastructure for core and edge deployments and majors on video surveillance and mainstream SME and enterprise use cases, including virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments and analytics.

Its edge hardware is the X3 range, which includes ruggedised versions, and X5 products for datacentre deployment. X5 models are 2U, while X3 are 1U. Both ranges offer hybrid and all-flash and scale to 12- and eight-node clusters respectively.