ASG's Security Solutions Blog

Is Security Mission Critical to Your Organization? Then How Secure is the Storage of Your Data? - Pivot3 has the Answer

 

By Ron Worman, The Sage Group 

When was the last time you put the security of your data as a priority in your security planning?

Most of us start thinking about cameras, access control, even video management, but quickly realize that we must be able to retain this data somewhere.

Our first reaction is we have a cost problem, a real concern with the proliferation of IP Video. So what do we do? You probably sit in a room with your ideal solution thrown out the window as you begin to compromise on video resolution, camera counts and retention of video on the storage device. Oh yes, security is knowing it works when you need it to... until you have a budget to deal with...

There are many approaches you can take, but Pivot3 believes they can help you protect your data and your budget through ‘storage virtualization' or allowing multiple storage arrays to act as one. This provides massive bandwidth through its clustered capability. As well they have built in simplified management, allowing for built-in high availability and failure tolerance, a simple but fast re-build on failure, and the ability to add capacity without taking down the system (cameras).

Why is this significant? "Storage is half the cost of implementation", says Lee Caswell, founder and CMO of Pivot3. "We bring cost savings through consolidation of hardware, reduced energy costs from reduction of power and cooling, and reduction of hardware investments through our virtual failover capability."

And the market is responding. Since Pivot3 has been recognized as being optimized for the video surveillance market, their corporate performance has tripled year over year. Caswell's biggest challenge is bridging the IT/Security chasm. The term ‘virtualization', although one of the hot topics in IT, is little known in security.

But Caswell is helping to change that. "Today, when things break, security requires that the cameras can still record, access is still available, and repairs can occur without interruption of service. Today, they attempt to do that through individual point solutions which require such things as dedicated failover servers and redundant switches on the network adding cost every step of the way. Pivot3's mission is to provide you the ability to have large scale storage that can tolerate disk or appliance failures. We do this through ‘virtual servers'."

To Caswell, this changes everything, from reduced dependence on external vendor support staff, to consolidation of hardware, to fault tolerant level failover that was, in the past, reserved for only the most critical applications.

Caswell believes one of the questions in the ‘Great Conversation' that security executives should be asking is: "How will the latest advancements in IT technologies improve my ability to deploy Video Surveillance?"

"Up until now, you could only have high availability in high risk applications. But the expectations of security and corporate executives are around ‘always on, always available'. And now we can deliver that cost effectively to our clients."

Pivot3 has many case studies around high availability, high reliability, and return on investment. In their Virtual booth you can learn more about their partners and solutions.