Dan's Take

Pivot3 Updates Its QoS Tool

The hyperconvergence vendor moves to generation 4.

• By Dan Kusnetzky
• 09/13/2016

I had the opportunity recently to speak with Pivot3 to learn more about its "smarter infrastructure" concept and recent product launch.

Before we got too far into the discussion, Pivot3 mentioned that it's been awarded more than 30 patents for its "hyperconverged and flash storage solutions" that include technology for software-defined storage, quality of service monitoring and flash storage array architecture.

The company also discussed its acquisition of NexGen storage and plans to begin integrating Pivot3's vSTAC SLX hyperconverged storage appliance and NexGen's N5 Flash storage arrays.

Defining 'Dynamic' Quality of Service
Pivot3 just launched the 4th generation of its Dynamic Quality of Service tool. The focus was  on improving data protection, QoS scheduling and application integration. Pivot3 said that these new improvements are available for users of both Pivot3's vSTAC SLX hyperconverged storage appliance and NexGen's N5 Flash storage arrays. Pivot3 says its Dynamic QoS technology allows customers to control the "4 Ps":

• Policy. the technology provides a number of pre-configured performance targets, and also allows customers to easily manage minimum/maximum storage use for their own applications.
• Priority. Dynamic QoS technology provides adaptive bandwidth management and adaptive queuing, making it possible for customers to make the best use of their storage infrastructure
• Placement . Customers can manually place data objects or allow the system to prioritize storage placement through a real-time system.
• Protection. Policy-driven automation that integrates with applications is supported, assuring customers they'll achieve the best performance and storage reliability.

The product demonstration showed me that even an industry analyst, like me, could easily see how data protection policies are currently set and modify them to better focus system resources to match business requirements.

Dan's Take: Useful, If Limited, Technology
While the conversation was interesting and the demonstration of Pivot3's technology was certainly impressive, I couldn't help but think about enterprises that either are not using Pivot3 or NexGen storage at all, or have only a small amount of that technology in their datacenter. For those places, Pivot3's Dynamic QoS technology would be of little or no use.

If your enterprise has adopted Pivot3 or NexGen flash storage systems, it's worth looking into their Dynamic QoS technology. Everyone else should consider seeking out other tools that provide dynamic storage monitoring and management. They include offerings by DataCore, Sanbolic (now owned by Citrix) and others.