Pivot3: We've Been Doing Hyper-Converged Since Nutanix, SimpliVity Were Just Whippersnappers

Pivot3, an Austin, Texas-based vendor founded in 2003, was selling a form of hyper-converged infrastructure when startups Nutanix and SimpliVity were just twinkles in the eyes of investors.

Now, Pivot3 -- which landed a $45 million private equity funding round in February -- is piggybacking on the marketing hype generated by hyper-converged startups to promote what it claims is a more efficient approach to storage.

"Both Nutanix and SimpliVity use replication and data deduplication, but that makes them inherently inefficient," Ron Nash, CEO of Pivot3, told CRN in a recent interview. "They have educated the market that having a sophisticated deduplication environment is an advantage, but we say you don't need that."

[Related: VMware's Support Dust-Up With Nutanix May Signal Future Hyper-Converged Tensions]

Pivot3 has deep storage industry roots: Bill Galloway, CTO and founder, holds several early patents on RAID technology. During seven years as a principal member of technical staff at Compaq, Galloway received 23 storage patents. He's also one of the primary architects of ProLiant servers, now sold by Hewlett-Packard.

Nutanix and SimpliVity, which together have raised nearly $600 million in venture funding, already have provided much of the groundwork in educating the market on what hyper-converged can deliver, Nash said.

What sets Pivot3 apart, according to Nash, is that it spent five years developing storage technology that's more efficient than what the startups are offering.

Nash said Pivot3 uses technology known as erasure coding, which breaks up data into multiple chunks and stores them across a range of locations and media types. Erasure coding has been around for a while, but Nash said Pivot3 has spent the past several years fine-tuning its performance.

"[Nutanix and SimpiVity] took existing storage technology and cobbled together other technology. We solved the storage problems first. Compared to the startups, we have more efficiencies on the storage side."

A SimpliVity spokeswoman didn't respond directly to Nash's assertions, but told CRN the startup has developed proprietary technology that makes deduplication run more efficiently.

"SimpliVity has a unique advantage through the OmniStack Accelerator Card, which off-loads dedupe, compression and optimization and enables efficiencies of 40:1 on average, while increasing performance," the spokeswoman said in an email.

Nutanix didn't respond to a request for comment.

Hyper-converged -- which refers to compute, storage, networking and virtualization running on x86 server hardware -- is one of the IT industry's hottest segments. But Nash said Pivot3 has had software that handles processing and storage on the same set of servers since 2008.

Back then, Pivot3 sold the technology as a purpose-built machine for video surveillance and security projects, but didn't play up the convergence of servers and storage in its marketing.

"We were hiding the name 'hyper-converged' because we didn't want to scare or confuse customers," which at the time consisted primarily of former law-enforcement officials who were not tech-savvy, said Nash.

Pivot3 expanded its scope from video surveillance to virtual desktops a few years ago. More recently, it moved into the backup and recovery market, said Nash.

Pivot3 is using its recent funding -- which brought its total funding to date to just over $173 million -- to hire more sales and marketing staff. Nash said Pivot3 also is working on a "greatly expanded partner program" that's focused on bringing in data center expertise.

However, Pivot3, thus far, only works with a handful of virtual desktop solution providers, none of which were available for comment. Pivot3's vendor partners include VMware, Dell, Red Hat, Cisco, F5 and Microsoft.

One longtime VMware partner told CRN he suspects Pivot3 is looking to recast its technology to capitalize on the market frenzy around hyper-converged infrastructure.

"I think they are trying to make their technology something more than it was originally designed for, since hyper-converged is the hot and sexy topic of the day," said the partner, who didn't want to be named. "I wouldn’t personally put much stock in them, as they’ve sputtered for a number of years unsuccessfully."

PUBLISHED MAY 15, 2015