VMworld 2017: Interview with Crystal Harrison @MrsPivot3

I had the pleasure of spending a few moments with Crystal Harrison, Pivot3’s dynamic VP of product strategy “@MrsPivot3”.

Crystal, I know Pivot3 from the innovative work you have been doing in security and surveillance. How has the interest been from customers in the move to datacenter and cloud?

“You know with the next generation release of Acuity, the industry’s first priority-aware hyper converged infrastructure “HCI” the demand has been incredible. While we started with 80% of the product being applied to security use cases we are now seeing a distribution of approx. 60% applied to datacenter and cloud with 40% deriving from our security practice. This is not due to any lack of demand on the security side it is just the demand on our cloud and datacenter focus has taken off with Acuity.”

We are pushing the boundaries with our HCI offering as we are leveraging NVM Express “NVMe” to capitalize on the low latency and internal parallelism of flash-based storage devices. All this is wrapped in an intuitive management interface controlled by policy.”

How do you deal with tiering within the storage components of Acuity?

Initially the policies manage where the data or instance lives in the system. We have the ability to dynamically reallocate resources  in real-time as needed. Say for example you have a critical business application that is starting to demand additional resources, we can recapture it from lower priority and policy assigned workloads on the fly. This protects your sensitive workloads and ensures they always have what they need.

How has the demand been from Cloud Service providers?

They love it. We have many flexible models including pay-by-the-drip metered and measured cost models. In addition the policy engine gives them the ability to set and charge for a set of performance based tiers for storage and compute. Iron Mountain is one of our big cloud provider customers. What is really unique is because we have lightweight management overhead and patented Erasure coding you can write to just about every terabyte that you buy which is important value to our customers and service providers.

Crystal, it really sounds like Pivot3 has built a high value innovative solution. Getting away from technology, what does Crystal do to relax when she is not helping customers adopt HCI?

My unwind is the gym. After a long day a good workout helps me reset for the next.

Crystal, it has been a pleasure, great to see Pivot3 having a great show here at VMworld 2017.