Pivot3 acquires NexGen to make wider SDN market play

Pivot3 is acquiring NexGen Storage to widen its offering in the software defined networking space. By adding NexGen’s portfolio of products, Pivot3 will deliver a complete set of hyper-converged solutions.

With the acquisition, both enterprise and mid-market companies will have access to a suite of solutions that will allow them to apply the right infrastructure and priority to each workload, application or business service according to business value, said Pivot3.

“By adding NexGen’s strengths in accelerated all-flash and hybrid storage, Pivot3 is uniquely expanding the traditional notion of hyper-convergence”, it said. Pivot3 says it intends to market and enhance all current and planned NexGen products.

“Everyone talks about the need for agility in terms of business needs, but in hyper-convergence workload utilisation and performance have been gating factors to expansion beyond the usual initial use cases,” said Ron Nash, CEO of Pivot3.

He said: “With the addition of NexGen’s capabilities, Pivot3 is now the only company in the market that broadly and deeply addresses this central data centre challenge, with a solution that allows IT to prioritise application performance based on business priority.

“We believe this agility is critical as customers move from legacy data centres to a software defined data centre that effortlessly handles a heterogeneous set of workloads.”

Unlike other storage arrays and hyper-converged systems that treat all data the same, said Pivot3, NexGen’s dynamic QoS governs performance targets, input/output (I/O) prioritisation and data placement, allowing customers to meet business service-level agreements.

For example, an organisation serving the healthcare market can prioritise mission-critical hospital system applications over the internal Microsoft Exchange server, preventing a surge in employee email downloads from interrupting life or death healthncare system operations.

“Not all data should be treated the same. The growing momentum of the Internet of Things (IoT), together with ever-increasing user-expectations and application-demands, means there is a pressing need for HCI platforms that are optimally built to manage the onslaught of disparate data,” said Mark Peters, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG).

“Pivot3’s new approach offers precisely this with its hyper-converged solution-suite. It includes compelling differentiations which enable it to support more extensive and expansive use cases by delivering increased and optimised value from the data it manages,” Peters said.

The transaction, for an undisclosed sum, is expected to close next month, Pivot3 said.

@AntonySavvas