An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief
By now, enterprise organizations are coming to understand the benefits of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). As they scramble to increase organizational agility, decrease time-to-market and reduce their operational footprint, they are increasingly turning to HCI for their most important, value-driving workloads. But as they do so, they are running into a common challenge with emerging, digital-era technologies: scaling it to meet the needs of the enterprise.
Pivot3, arguably the oldest HCI vendor, believes it can help. The company has focused its development efforts in the two areas it believes will most help organizations scale their HCI efforts: performance and automation. From a performance perspective, they claim that Acuity, their new HCI architecture, delivers nine times the throughput while providing a 30% efficiency boost, but with 25% less infrastructure.
While higher levels of performance will translate into smaller operational footprints and greater versatility, it does no good if the resulting high-performance architecture is not manageable at scale. It is here that Pivot3 is changing the game. Acuity uses a policy-based, Quality-of-Service (QoS) management paradigm. As an organization provisions workloads, they assign them to a QoS-based policy. Based on that policy, the system automatically provisions resources and assigns performance targets. The system then uses those targets to automatically prioritize and reallocate resources to ensure that the most critical workloads meet their SLAs.
Moreover, Pivot3’s approach enables organizations to adjust QoS policies in an ad-hoc fashion or on a scheduled basis to accommodate planned changes in priority (to support month-end processing, for instance). The company derives both their performance advantages and automation capabilities from their distributed, scale-out architecture in which they fully and dynamically integrate capacity, IOPS, and bandwidth. Enterprise organizations are only now beginning to deal with the challenges of scaling HCI, but as they do, Pivot3’s performance and automation capabilities may prove to be a significant advantage.
Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.
