Pivot3 is stressing that while other HCI vendors have intelligent hybrid cloud strategies, they have one that is in production today.
Bruce Milne, Chief Marketing Officer at Pivot3
Hyperconverged infrastructure [HCI] vendor Pivot3 has announced the expansion of their Intelligent Hybrid Cloud, which they originally launched in March, for the AWS cloud solely. Now they have expanded their cloud support to Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. They have also expanded the capabilities available in the cloud. It’s an extension of what Pivot3 has termed a multi-phase strategy, designed to unify on-premises and public cloud infrastructures with policy-based management and automated resource orchestration technologies.
“This is about filling out the promise of the intelligent cloud engine we are building,” said Bruce Milne, Pivot3’s CMO. “Our partners have told us that they need a cloud story – even though most customers aren’t ready to turn over control through the cloud. Just having an intelligence engine in the cloud to make recommendations is good enough at this point. We will continue to roll out functionality as we believe the market is ready to consume it. The important thing is that this gives partners a cloud story, with functionality that is there today, and not on a distant road map.”
The new enhancements, which apply to all the supported clouds, add new capabilities for workload mobility and disaster recovery.
“These new enhancements provide mobility for those workloads back and forth,” Milne said. “They let customers migrate any workload to AWS, Azure and Google Cloud and back, in a few simple steps.”
Milne said that this functionality is all about policy management, automating a manually-based model where people set thresholds, to constantly reassess new resources.
“We allow the Line of Business units to determine priorities, so that the workloads with the top priorities will meet their SLAs,” Milne indicated. “Our engine will prioritize it. That has been unique functionality of our on-prem solution. Now we are extending that capability to the cloud, in our next step towards allowing customers to fully embrace many clouds.”
The cloud migration capabilities themselves come through a new Pivot3 partnership with CloudEndure.
“CloudEndure has a set of workloads around live workload mobility and disaster recovery that allow you to move workloads up, back and across clouds, with seamless integration,” Milne indicated. CloudEndure’s live workload mobility technology provides continuous block-level replication and application stack orchestration at the touch of a button.
The Azure interface
“CloudEndure facilitates all the cloud migrations,” Milne said. “However, the actual engine, which came when we acquired NexGen, is what handles the cost structure elements of our policy management. We have enhanced that since we acquired it with machine learning capabilities. Our policy management engine is powered by this intelligence, and does the determinations around cost, compliance and risk.”
Milne said that while many partners have already aggressively moved into the space, including MSPs as well as traditional partners, customers in North America are still testing the waters regarding business continuity in the cloud,
“The response so far to our AWS announcement shows that it is still early days in North America,” he said. “Europe is already all about business continuity in the cloud. Organizations in North America are still trying this out, and we give them a path to do that. Many customers are not ready to deploy that yet, but they want to see a road. We are probably about another nine months away from more mainstream adoption. Certainly, there is no end of interest in the cloud. The issue is how you best make use of it, and we think that the building blocks of HCI have the greatest promise for achieving the benefits of the cloud.”
Pivot3’s new cloud workload migration and disaster recovery capabilities are available now.
