Clustered storage comes to video surveillance

Pivot3 RAIGE Storage Cluster

Developments of the week in storage

A newcomer to storage clustering is Pivot3 and the company debuted this week with an appliance intended for digital video storage.

The company’s Pivot3 RAIGE Storage Cluster – consisting of storage nodes called Databanks that are connected together using Gigabit Ethernet – runs over iSCSI. Each node consists of an industry standard x86 server.

A RAIGE (RAID Across Independent Gigabit Ethernet) operating system virtualizes the data on the Databanks into a single storage space. The RAIGE Director centrally manages the RAIGE cluster. A driver installed on each Databank allows multipathing I/O for fault tolerance and performance.

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A newcomer to storage clustering is Pivot3 and the company debuted this week with an appliance intended for digital video storage.

The company’s Pivot3 RAIGE Storage Cluster – consisting of storage nodes called Databanks that are connected together using Gigabit Ethernet – runs over iSCSI. Each node consists of an industry standard x86 server.

A RAIGE (RAID Across Independent Gigabit Ethernet) operating system virtualizes the data on the Databanks into a single storage space. The RAIGE Director centrally manages the RAIGE cluster. A driver installed on each Databank allows multipathing I/O for fault tolerance and performance.

RAIGE provides block-based virtualization and data protection. Because RAIGE allows RAID to work across nodes, whole node failures do not affect the operation of the cluster. Neither does adding or removing nodes. The RAIGE cluster also supports nodes of different configurations.

As nodes are added or removed the system rebalances its resources and how it accesses data. As many as 32 Databanks can be clustered together. A RAIGE system can support as much as 48TB of data.

The company claims that video surveillance storage can account for as much as 50% of a deployment.

Pivot3 was founded in 2003 and is funded by LightSpeed Venture and Interwest Partners for $22 million.

Each RAIGE node is priced at $17,500.

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Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.