Pivot3
Smarter IT Infrastructure for Citrix Virtual Computing Environments

With market-leading cloud, collaboration, networking, and virtualization technologies, the vision of Citrix is a world where anyone can work and play from anywhere. Promoting a virtual computing environment, Citrix platform transforms IT business by delivering efficiency, agility and growth. Along with these benefits, the Citrix capabilities place a lot more demand on organizations’ IT infrastructures. The recent union of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) pioneer Pivot3 and NexGen Storage, a leading provider of PCIe flash arrays with storage Quality of Service (QoS), offers a compelling combination of hyperconverged and flash storage technologies and solutions that dramatically improve data center simplicity, agility, economics and application user experience—and enable Citrix environments to virtualize the most challenging workloads. The Pivot3 PCIe Flash Arrays (formerly NexGen) and vSTAC Data Appliances are Citrix Ready certified, and the Pivot3 PCIe Flash Arrays are validated under the Citrix Ready VDI Capacity Program.

“Citrix customers count on Pivot3’s capabilities to deliver outstanding efficiency, predictable performance and simplicity as they virtualize their most challenging workloads. With a PCIe-based flash architecture and advanced, industry-leading QoS, we allow Citrix customers to deploy multiple, mixed workloads on a hyperconverged platform or a standalone flash storage array with the confidence that they will perform even under extreme demand scenarios,” said John Spiers, Chief Strategy Officer, Pivot3.

With Pivot3 N5 PCIe Flash Arrays and the Pivot3 software-defined hyperconverged architecture customers have the ability to combine the delivery of predictable performance for mixed application workloads, including VDI, in either hyperconverged or traditional server-based environments. Leveraging the Citrix platform, Pivot3 delivers a flash array designed to accelerate the most demanding workloads utilizing a multi-tier architecture that integrates PCIe flash and a patented policy-based storage QoS with a dynamic provisioning layer. With these capabilities Citrix customers are able to deliver a consistent, predictable end-user experience while making the most efficient use of IT resources and budget.

“Mixed workload support and simple performance management are critical for Citrix environments,” added Spiers. “With Pivot3’s software-defined HCI architecture and its addition of the NexGen Storage capabilities, Pivot3 is now the only company in the market that broadly and deeply addresses data center challenges with Citrix-based solutions that allow IT the agility to prioritize application performance based on business priorities.

The combination of XenDesktop and Pivot3 allows customers to scale virtual desktops with more predicable performance, efficiency and scalability

This agility is critical as customers move toward software-defined data centers that effortlessly handle a heterogeneous set of demanding workloads.”

Citrix’s software, XenDesktop, running on Pivot3 HCI allows users to simply and quickly deploy VDI environments. On top of that, Pivot3’s patented Erasure Coding and distributed hyperconverged infrastructure technology delivers high storage utilization rates and six nines availability. “We can deliver up to 94 percent storage utilization,” points out Spiers. “The combination of XenDesktop and Pivot3 allows customers to scale virtual desktops with more predictable performance, efficiency and scalability.”

One of Citrix’s customers, NCS, heavily benefitted from Pivot3’s flash storage solution. The organization captures huge amount of structured and unstructured customer data around the world. “We were having increasing performance issues,” said Michael Frank, Manager of the IT Services Group, NCS. “Especially as we began doing more data mining, we knew future performance and scalability was going to be a major concern.” The NCS IT team used Citrix XenDesktop and selected the Pivot3 N5 PCIe Flash Array due in part to its ability to deliver multiple QoS levels and to utilize flash efficiently via its dynamic data placement capability, which eliminated contention issues and ensured that mission critical applications are received on the highest levels of storage services.

Forging ahead, Pivot3 wants to expand its unique solutions to serve the needs of additional Citrix customers across the globe. “Leveraging our Citrix partnership, we plan to deliver additional technologies and services to improve business results for companies deploying Citrix virtual computing environments,” concludes Spiers.