Pivot3
Hyper-Converged Infrastructure for Demanding Video Surveillance Systems

Historically, video surveillance has primarily been used forensically after an incident has occurred, and as a potential deterrent or prevention mechanism. However, security technology has vastly improved with the shift from analog cameras to digital (IP) solutions. Organizations can now use video surveillance for more than just monitoring, loss recovery and deterrence. It can be used to protect organizations from liabilities, to recognize and respond to incidents in real time, for profit-maximizing business intelligence and to prevent interruptions to business operations. “We are seeing the technology being adopted in environments such as retail, manufacturing, hospitality and others, where it can be used to mitigate risk and provide a direct operational and financial benefit,” says Bruce Milne, CMO of Pivot3.

The security functions of organizations, institutions, and government agencies face serious and emerging challenges including increased security risks, business pressure to drive return on security investments, and the rising costs to transport, process, store and protect immense amounts of critical, sensitive data. “There is so much critical data being generated today, that companies need flexible tools to process, analyze and protect the data they accumulate,” says Brandon Reich, Senior Director of Video Surveillance at Pivot3.

Pivot3, the Austin, TX-based hyper-converged infrastructure provider, provides CIOs with a high-performance platform that is capable of handling the demanding, write-intensive workloads of video surveillance, while ensuring that data is stored, protected and always available. The platform can be scaled linearly without disruption to the system so that users can accommodate changing budgets and needs such as higher resolution cameras, new technologies like video analytics and 360-degree cameras, longer retention times and new regulatory requirements. “Our solution is optimized to handle CPU and bandwidth-intensive video, so the platform achieves and sustains extremely high throughput to prevent video loss and image quality degradation,” says Milne. “Additionally, we can mobilize a fully functional client application environment, so authorized personnel can gain immediate access to the information in a highly secure manner.”

Our solution is optimized to handle CPU and bandwidth-intensive video, so the platform achieves and sustains extremely high throughput to prevent video loss and image quality degradation

Pivot3’s hyper-converged video surveillance solutions currently store and protect data from millions of HD cameras, with over 400PB of installed storage in 53 countries around the world. A major airport facility in Texas recently turned to Pivot3 to solve the challenges presented by updating their existing infrastructure that was being highly stressed by new surveillance technology. “With over 700 cameras already in use, they needed more cameras, higher resolution and to deploy video analytics to holistically revamp their security operations,” says Reich. Pivot3 helped the airport double their storage capacity to two petabytes, cut the number of server racks used for surveillance in half, and enable virtualization of video management servers. Pivot3 also virtualized the client desktops, enabling a state-of-the-art video-wall that had the capability to simultaneously display 60 live streams at a fraction of the cost of typical video wall solutions. “The system we provided is part of a seamless consolidated architecture so all of our solutions work in harmony with other data center components without any compatibility issues,” says Reich.

Pivot3 plans to continue delivering their enterprise-class video surveillance infrastructure in a simple to deploy and scale-out appliance model. The firm is also developing comprehensive infrastructure solutions that will allow cus-tomers to assemble processor, memory or storage intensive applications in real time. “We believe that we have the opportunity to create solutions that allow customers to be agile and meet their demands as they grow,” concludes Milne.