Pivot3 launches Acuity hyper-converged with NVMe flash and QoS

Hyper-converged infrastructure maker Pivot3 has upgraded its operating environment to provide quality of service for applications. It has also added an NVMe-equipped Accelerator node that can act as cache in front of main storage to provide performance boost of 2x to 3x.

The operating environment for the combined server-storage product is called Acuity. It replaces the previous vSTAC SLX software in which Pivot3’s operating software sat alongside that inherited from the company’s acquisition of storage software maker NexGen.

While the Acuity release knits together the two elements of the Pivot3 product range, the company is keen to emphasise the policy-driven quality of service operations possible with this release.

CEO Ron Nash said: “Most hyper-converged has been sold for single application examples, but we noticed that about one-third of our customers purchased it to run multiple applications. For that, you have to have automation to give quality of service based on policy.”

“Providing optimisation like this also allows us to boost the number of VMs per server by 2x to 3x,” he added.

Previously, Pivot3 had quality of service on nodes based on former NexGen products, but not on its hyper-converged systems.

Meanwhile, Pivot3 has announced NVMe-based Accelerator modules. These are hyper-converged nodes for which the customer can specify the presence of an NVMe flash card.

The NVMe flash sits at the front end of the data path between compute and storage so that data doesn’t have to pass through the storage controller. To do so would nullify the advantages of NVMe as the controller is a bottleneck in which SAS and Sata protocol handling take place, as well as other storage functionality.

So, Pivot3 has placed NVMe as cache from where working data can be served, or migrated to longer term storage in the back end. Here also, Nash claims a performance boost of 2x to 3x using NVMe Accelerator nodes.

The Pivot3 hyper-converged product range comprises four X5 node types: the X5-2000 hybrid node (HDD and flash) with up to 96TB of capacity; the X5-2500 Hybrid Accelerator, that adds 1.6TB or 3,2TB of NVMe flash; the X5-6000 flash node with up to 30TB of flash capacity, and; the X5-6500 Flash Accelerator node, which adds the option for 1.6TB of NVMe flash.

Hybrid options can be clustered to a maximum of 12 nodes and flash options to 16 nodes. Pivot3 nodes are Ethernet connected and use erasure coding as a data protection method.