Pivot3 has announced it has entered the Data Protection Market with a Scale-out Data Protection Platform that is qualified with ten independent software vendor (ISV) partners. The new platform is designed to simplify, reduce cost, and speed up high-capacity disk-based backup, recovery, deduplication, and replication in today’s most complex IT environments.

The Pivot3 Scale-out Data Protection Platform simplifies high-capacity installations with an intuitive appliance approach where capacity, performance and high availability scale with the number of appliances. Pivot3 software aggregates the disk, network and compute resources of commodity server appliances to simplify configuration, failover-protect both storage and ISV data protection applications and open up parallel access to the hard disk drives for maximum throughput. The use of virtual servers in place of physical servers provides an instant ROI for end users and resellers. The linear scaling of performance allows the system to support deduplication streams at up to 20 TB/hour.

Resellers have deployed the Pivot3 Scale-out Data Protection Platform to protect Exchange data, medical images and hosted disaster recovery environments. “We chose Pivot3 because we were looking for a high-performance solution that was easy to implement and simple to scale over time,” said Philip Thompson, principal at Ciphaus, a Seattle-based reseller.

“We needed a high-availability solution to protect our hosting business, and the self-healing nature of the Pivot3 solution really appealed to us from a support perspective,” commented Bob Hodge, president of DeviceLogix, a Texas-based reseller.

“We have continued to load up the Pivot3 system because of the economics and simplicity of the system,” said Josh Herron, president of Digi Systems, an Oklahoma-based system integrator.

“It is unusual to find value propositions that are so mainstream, clear-cut and immediate,” said Mark Peters, senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. “The Pivot3 Scale-out Application Platform represents a unique approach to integrated virtualization that addresses the key needs of data protection users - scalability, speed and cost containment - while adding easy management and ‘system protection’ via its virtual machine failover.”

In response to relentless data growth, IT organizations are adopting disk to accelerate backup and recovery. In its April 2010 Data Protection Market Trends research report, Enterprise Strategy Group found that 18 percent of responding organizations relied on disk exclusively in backup and recovery operations while 62 percent used a combination of disk and tape in a disk-to-disk-to-tape architecture. ESG research respondents cited their most pressing challenges: keeping pace with the capacity of data to protect, the need to reduce backup and recovery times, and backup hardware costs. The Pivot3 Scale-out Data Protection Platforms address each one of these challenges with a non-disruptive scaling model, fast performance based on scale-out parallel operations, and a commodity hardware cost basis that drives hardware solution costs below $1,000/terabyte.

“We have a 100 percent channel model today with 50 channel partners and we are looking to double that number to 100 as we move into the data protection market,” said Lee Caswell, founder and chief marketing officer at Pivot3. “We help reseller partners generate terrific margins by moving up-market into 100 TB SAN opportunities where our consolidated high-availability approach saves end users 40 percent in power and 25 percent in cost.”