Pivot3 hyperconverged infrastructure delivers industry-leading performance, scale and resiliency for modern security and surveillance environments. Optimized for video surveillance, Pivot3 eliminates dropped frames, data loss, and unplanned downtime so your video assets are always available and protected from failures. By leveraging a vast partner technology network, Pivot3 supports any application and any device on a common infrastructure that is easy-to-manage and highly scalable to meet the most demanding requirements. With deployments in 53 countries around the world, Pivot3 is the most advanced IT infrastructure solution at the center of the modern security and surveillance ecosystem.
About the Customer
In today’s ultra-connected world, new business models bring highly profitable routes to revenue. To seize these opportunities, modern organizations are undergoing a digital transformation that is placing intensified demands on IT departments. Flex Inc., founded in 1969 as Flextronics Inc., has skillfully navigated this new paradigm to become the second largest electronics and original design provider in the world, providing innovative engineering, manufacturing, real-time supply chain insight and logistics services to a wide range of customers, including some of the largest, most well-known brands in business, such as Apple, Cisco, Microsoft, Lenovo, Dell, Nike and Barracuda. Today, Flex is a highly differentiated technology solutions company that serves more than a dozen markets and has deep technical expertise and leading-edge facilities around the world. One of its notable differentiators is its “Sketch-to-Scale™” platform, which enables customers to reduce development costs and lead time to commercialization, while accelerating time to market and time to scale.
The Challenge
The ability to provide both physical security of production processes through video surveillance and access control, as well as to protect the valuable intellectual property of both the company and its customers, are critical to Flex. The failure to meet requirements – because of poor system performance, changing environments, failed hardware/data loss, etc. – would compromise their ability to meet customer service level agreements (SLAs). It was in this environment that Flex embarked on a massive upgrade of its video surveillance system across their global facilities. Key evaluation requirements included scalability, reliability, and the ability to seamlessly integrate with leading video management software in use by Flex. “We conductedproof-of-concept testing with enterprise SAN and direct-attached storage NVR vendors, but it was Pivot3’s hyperconverged technology that caught our attention. It outperformed other systems and integrated exceptionally well with our video management software,” said Tyrone Chambliss, Director of Brand Protection & Security Systems, Flex.
The Solution
Flex selected Pivot3’s hyperconverged platforms, which are specifically optimized for video surveillance workloads to provide the highest levels of performance, resiliency and scalability. With Pivot3, Flex is able to store critical video surveillance data without loss, protected from failures and always available when needed. Flex has deployed more than 75 Pivot3 appliances at more than a dozen Flex locations worldwide, securely storing over 7PBs of video data from roughly 5,000 cameras. “Our Pivot3 video surveillance storage solution protects our video data, allows us to proactively monitor our systems, alerts us to any issues and works seamlessly with our video management software,” said Chambliss. “We can now monitor activity in real-time and see what is happening across the video network so we can prevent issues, rather than deal with them after they’ve already occurred.” “Our expectations have progressed from real-time video monitoring to immediate alarm response with video integration,” said Chambliss. “NVRs can’t deliver that type of solution, and enterprise SANs don’t give you that level of performance. Pivot3’s approach combines a VMS-agnostic system with performance and resiliency to meet our requirements.” While traditional video surveillance is vital to brand protection and security, Flex is also moving towards using video surveillance as a more advanced business tool. To verify employee attendance, Flex uses video surveillance and their time tracking solution together to provide video of employees clocking in and out of work. In another unique application, Flex is considering video surveillance for what Chambliss calls “product accounting.” The surveillance solution is used to ensure that all parts that enter a manufacturing line are present at all stations on the line and match the production at the end of the line. Said Chambliss, “If we start with a 10,000 piece order at the beginning, we need to ensure we have 10,000 pieces at the end of the line. If not, we can use our surveillance system to find the variance and identify the station where the incident happened. This type of loss prevention has immediate business benefit.”
The Results
“Video surveillance is vitally important to our business,” said Chambliss. “Pivot3 plays a critical role in ensuring our data is protected, properly backed up and readily available when needed.” Pivot3’s ability to linearly scale capacity and performance allows Flex to meet growing data storage needs as it expands operations, adds camera counts, shifts toward higher resolution models and meets extended data retention requirements. The unique architecture of Pivot3’s HCI surveillance solution ensures all video data is accessible centrally regardless of physical location. In the event of hardware failures, virtual servers automatically restart on another appliance with no user intervention. With Pivot3’s built-in server failover, previously recorded video and security data remains fully accessible. “My centralized team can easily monitor the status of my Pivot3 infrastructure around the world, including all servers, CPU, memory, system performance, and power using Pivot3’s optimized vCenter plug-in,” said Chambliss. “Since we deployed Pivot3, it’s proven to be very reliable and the customer support has been exceptional. It has also exceeded our expectations from a performance level. We plan to deploy Pivot3 HCI solutions in more locations to protect our video investments, allowing us to ensure the same high comfort level across our sites.” At the same time, the Pivot3 architecture simplified administration for Flex and reduced the need for its staff to have advanced IT skills. Pivot3’s management capabilities allow multiple Flex teams to share ownership of the solution. ‘Our ability to manage our video surveillance solution across IT, security and other departmental teams is essential to ensuring the system not only works technically, but also is solving our day-to-day business challenges effectively and efficiently,” noted Chambliss. “Our customers have extremely high expectations for us, and we now have an ideal infrastructure in place to support their needs,” concluded Chambliss. “Equally important, beyond the technology, the Pivot3 team itself has been exceptional. Pivot3’s knowledge of video surveillance is unique. They deeply understand our business requirements and actively work with us to ensure we have the optimal solution to meet and exceed our customers’ requirements. We consider Pivot3 a true partner.”
About Pivot3
Pivot3 improves the simplicity and economics of the enterprise datacenter with industry- leading hyperconverged technology. By collapsing storage, compute and networking on commodity hardware, Pivot3 provides a software-defined solution that enables customers to scale to massive volumes and gain twice the performance of competing solutions, all at drastically reduced infrastructure requirements. The result is predictable, prioritized data and application performance based on business value. Pivot3 has over 2,200 customers around the world and has deployed more than 16,000 hyperconverged infrastructures in multiple industries such as healthcare, government, transportation, security, entertainment, education, gaming and retail.
For more information, visit Pivot3.com