Pivot3 Edge Protect "Game Changer" Surveillance Appliance

By: Brian Karas, Published on Apr 05, 2016

Pivot3 has announced their "Edge Protect [link no longer available]" appliance, described as "a game changer", claiming to provide "enterprise-class infrastructure without enterprise-class costs".

IPVM reviewed pricing and product details with Pivot3. Inside, we look at the Edge Protect in more depth and how it compares to rival products from Dell, Exacq, Avigilon and Milestone.

****** *** ********* ***** "Edge ******* [**** ** longer *********]" *********, ********* as "* **** *******", ******** ** ******* "**********-***** ************** ******* **********-***** costs".

**** ******** ******* *** product ******* **** ******. Inside, ** **** ** the **** ******* ** more ***** *** *** it ******** ** ***** products **** ****, *****, Avigilon *** *********.

[***************]

COTS ******** + ****** ********

**** ******* ** * COTS ** ****** **** Pivot3's*********** ******** *********'* **** *********.

******** *****:

  • ***** **** **-**** ** 3.6Ghz ***
  • **-**** *** (************)
  • ***-**** **** ******* (************)
  • ** **** ****

*******

****** ***** ***-****** ****** ******* from $**,*** *** **** of ****** ******* ** $39,000 *** **** ** usable *******.

******: ** ***** ****** for ************* ** *** pricing ****** ********** **** report, ***** ******** **** CMO ***** ***** ** below:

****** *** *** ****** the ******* ***** ***** is *** * "**** Pack" ** * ******* / **********. *** ******** description ** **** *** total ********* ******** ***** for *** ****, *.*., for *** *, *** 3 ********** **** * total ** **** ****** storage. *** **** *** those * **********, **** 15TB ****** *** ********** is $**,***.

* ****** ****** **** ~1/3 ** *** ****** specs ***** ** */* of *** ***** ***** above (*.*., *** ********* from *** * ***** be $**,*** ** $**,*** for *** ****).

Dual ********** *******: *****-***** *** ** **** ************ ******

*** **** ******* *** be ******** ** * stand-alone ******, ** ** a *-**** ******* ** provide ******'* **** ************ solution.

** * ********** ****, video ********** ** ***** at *******, ***** ** abnormally *** *** * modern ************ *********. ********** systems ** ***-***+****. *** limited ***** ********** ** due ** *** ********** overhead ** ******'* ********** software.

** *** *** *** deploying *********** ** * cluster ** *** *** resiliency ******** ** ******'* architecture ***** ** ** benefit ****** *** ****** hypervisor.  

******** ** * *******, video ********** **** ** to *******, *** **** importantly *** *** ******* the "** ********" ***** on *** *********. ******'* architecture *** *** ******* of ***** **** ** sustain *** **** ** not **** * ***, but ** ****** ******. It ** *********** **** ** the ****** *****.

******* *** **** ******** still ******* * *******, and **** *** ******* *** **** ** *** licenses *** *** ********.

Comparative *******

************ ********* ***'* **** similar ***** *** ** found *** ************* ***** prices:

  • * ********** **** ****** with *** **** ***, 16GB ***, *** ** RAID5 *******, **** ****** pre-loaded *** ** ********* for ~$*,***.
  • ********* ** **** ** Appliance **** **** ** storage *** ** **** of ~$**,***, ********* ** ACC ******** ******** (**** ~$4,000).
  • * **** ***** *** ******, **** ** ******** *** be ********* *** ~$**,***.
  • *** ***** *** *** ******* ****** $*,*** for * **** ***** with ** *** *****.

***** *** ***** ** the ****** ********, * customer *** ****** ******* resiliency ***** ****** * Windows-based ******** ** ********* and * *****-***** ***** recorder in * ****-******** ************.  This ***** *** **** provide ********* *********, *** would **** ******** **** a ****-***** ******* ** either *** ********* ****** OR *** ***/***. **** is * **** ******** scenario, *** ********* **** only **** ******** ******** are ******** ** ** able ** ******* **** pricing.

********'* ******** ****** **** likely ** ** ******* they ************ ***** *** require ******'* ******** ** high ************.

Game ******* *********

****** **** ********* ****** hard ** ***** ******* for ******* *******, ****** their ******* ********* **** scale.

*** * * **** Pivot3 **** ******* ******, given *** **** ** failover, ******* ********** *** cost (****** **** $**,*** for *** *** ****** storage *****), ** ** unlikely **** ***** **** find ** *********.

* * **** ****** **** Protect ******, ***** *** failover ************ *** ********* throughput, ** ****** ** be **** *********, *** those **** ****** **** Pivot3's ******** *** ******* expansion ************ *** *** willing ** ******** * ~$5,000 ***** ******* ** get ****. ***** ****** ***** their *** ** ****** for *** ******** ** **** availability ******* **** ***** be ***** **** ** simpler ** *****.

** ** ***** ***** with ***** ****** ******, high ******* ******* *** uptime ************, **** ******** infrastructure *** ****** ****** may ** **** ***** markets.

*******, **** ** *** much ** * **** changer *** ** ***** some **** ** ******** for * ******* **** is ************ ******* ****************** *** *** ****** IT ******.

Comments (10)

Avatar

Jon Dillabaugh

Pro Focus LLC
04/05/16 04:00pm

Quad Gb NIC's, yet only 100Mb of processing power... brilliant!

Undisclosed Integrator #1

04/05/16 05:03pm

The game appears unchanged part made me laugh. It's insanely expensive.

Avatar

Sean Nelson

Nelly's Security
04/05/16 07:49pm

I honestly dont see how they would sell even one of these at this price. The markup on these has to be insane.

Avatar

Brian Karas

IPVM | In reply to Sean Nelson | 04/05/16 09:42pm

To be fair, they're not pushing these in a mainstream market, it's typically going to be companies that see the value in the whole "hyperconvergence" thing.

A friend of mine bought a new Lamborghini last year. One of the options added cupholders, and a couple of other interior bits and was $20,000. For most people $20,000 buys an entire car, in this case it was a "small charge" for some convenience items added to a larger product. He probably could have also gone to PepBoys and bought something that clips on a dashboard vent to hold his latte and saved $19,995.

I don't think Pivot3 will sell many (any?) of these as stand-alone servers, it doesn't make any sense. They might sell some that way to a customer who is planning to upgrade later but just wants to get something in quickly for now.

The more likely scenario is that a customer who has already bought into Pivot3's larger concept and has bigger servers deployed (the Lamborghini of this analogy) might buy these "cupholders" for some remote sites in order to keep their overall system consistent. Sure, they might be overkill compared to other options, but in the context of uniformity they can justify the price to themselves.

I would not anticipate many customers that aren't using Pivot3 hardware at other sites to look at this as a practical solution for their smaller/remote sites. Someone running a beefy Husky appliance at the main office would deploy a Husky appliance or 2 at the remote sites and call it a day.

In the past I was at another startup that sold "iron wrapped software" to a niche customer, similar to Pivot3's business model. It's tough because as a business you need to make some margin on the bare hardware, plus you need margin for your own software and for the build process (eg: technician time) to load it up. Even if you have an automated build process it can be more time consuming than you think. This naturally puts you into having to chase enterprise-class customers with bigger budgets. These customers have longer sales cycles, which increase the sales cost, which increases what you have to charge... In the end, you have to charge a LOT for what on the outside appears to be a run of the mill Dell/HP/Intel reference box with your "secret sauce" preloaded. Personally, I wouldn't want to chase that kind of business again.

Undisclosed #2

04/05/16 09:30pm

Given the price of a stack of 3 Edge Protect units, a customer who wanted maximum resiliency could deploy a Windows-based Avigilon HD Appliance and a linux-based Exacq recorder in a dual-recorder architecture.

At the time of failure though wouldn't all the monitoring users go down until they switched to the other appliance and loaded a different vendors client program?

I'm assuming that the Pivot 3 cluster users would not notice nor have to do anything in event of failure. If it don't do that then it's pointless.

That said, I agree that most businesses would rather deal with a failover headache in case of the loss of a server; and $30,000 buys a lot of aspirin.

Avatar

Brian Karas

IPVM | In reply to Undisclosed #2 | 04/05/16 10:00pm

At the time of failure though wouldn't all the monitoring users go down until they switched to the other appliance and loaded a different vendors client program?

No, we'd have fully redundant operators too ;)

Yes, my proposed solution gives cheap/simple resiliency at the cost of operator stress of switching over systems. It's highly unlikely anyone would really want that approach, but it does technically offer benefits that even the Pivot3 solution does not.

In reality, dual identical Husky (or Avigilon or Exacq or whatever) servers with some disk RAID, and a competent IT staff that monitors and maintains the machines, does backups/archives and so on would likely cover you against most realistic outages.

I like what Pivot3 is doing in concept. I've liked it since my friend first showed me a demo in 2003 of a similar concept at a stealth company he founded called Katana that later became Virtual Iron. The problem is that it's expensive. It's expensive to develop, it's expensive to setup the initial clusters, and it's expensive to have N+1 (or more) of your required compute resources to make the whole thing tick. Very few companies are able to justify the added expense for the incremental resiliency.

Undisclosed #2

In reply to Brian Karas | 04/05/16 10:10pm

It's highly unlikely anyone would really want that approach...

No, I like it. It's the 'put each egg in a different basket' approach.

Much like when they select the tires on a newly commissioned jet how they intentionally choose from several different lots, to ameliorate the chances of a multiple tire failure on landing due to a single wonky production run.

Actually I don't know they do this, I just want to believe they do. ;)

Avatar

Brian Karas

IPVM | 04/05/16 11:02pm

Pivot3's CMO provided the following response to this article in an email to us:

- There are significant benefits to a software-defined SAN that we believe are worth exploring in your analysis. All cameras have access to all storage regardless of which physical server they are associated with, and recorded video remains fully accessible even when an entire node fails. For customers for whom surveillance video is critical data, this is invaluable.

- We believe that the value of erasure coding is understated in the analysis as well. Using our patented techniques, we can protect data against the loss of up to 3 disks or an entire node plus one disk. This is not just RAID for servers, it is a much higher level of fault tolerance and a huge improvement over RAID.

- You have brought up throughput as an issue in the article. Our solution can scale up to 6 nodes/600 MBPS, and the traffic is automatically balanced across the cluster - this means that we scale very effectively and efficiently as end users' needs grow. So our system will handle roughly 600 Mbps of ingest, excluding live video redirect. One of the benefits is that it will sustain that throughput even during failures, a key differentiator from DAS. We also achieve this throughput at high fault tolerance levels (3 disk / 1 node + 1 disk) .... this is unique, since other DAS systems have to cut back their fault tolerance to achieve high throughput claims. We do not expect customers to have an issue with throughput with our systems based on our unique technology and approach; our benchmarks have borne out that most implementations of this scale in the market will be well served by our configuration.

We are also getting clarification on pricing and will update the post accordingly once verified.

Undisclosed #2

In reply to Brian Karas | 04/05/16 11:50pm

So our system will handle roughly 600 Mbps of ingest, excluding live video redirect. One of the benefits is that it will sustain that throughput even during failures, a key differentiator from DAS.

So then assumedly, it will still do 300Mbps on a three node cluster with one failure.

And 2 standalone servers can each do 100Mbps X 2 = 200Mbps.

Yet 2 clustered servers do 300Mbps? How? Because of the shared drive array? There must be a better answer.

Undisclosed #2

04/07/16 09:12pm

Forgive me but I'm confused about the pricing. In the UPDATE clarification you ask whether the $21000 is for one box or three. He seems to say "1". Yet you are saying it is for 3. Was the email recanted or am I reading it wrong?

Login to read this IPVM report.
Why do I need to log in?
IPVM conducts unique testing and research funded by member's payments enabling us to offer the most independent, accurate and in-depth information.

Related Reports

NetApp Video Surveillance Profile on Mar 09, 2020
NetApp is increasing its efforts in video surveillance and told IPVM surveillance storage is the fastest-growing segment of its $6+ billion...
Video Surveillance Architecture 101 on Feb 18, 2020
Video surveillance can be designed and deployed in a number of ways. This 101 examines the most common options and architectures used in...
Proactive CCTV "Only Affordable Video Archiving Solution" Profile on Aug 12, 2019
Proactive CCTV is claiming to offer "the only affordable video archiving solution on the market", reducing the storage typically required for H.265...
Razberi Technologies Company Profile on Aug 06, 2019
Razberi says they have doubled their revenue in the first half of 2019, citing their proprietary camera hardening and cybersecurity capabilities...
Ionodes Company Profile on Jul 31, 2019
What happened to Ionodes? With seasoned leadership from Jean-Paul Saindon founder of SmartSight and Dr. Michael Gilge, founder of VCS, back in...
Startup Rhombus Systems Says Twice the Features, Half the Price of Verkada on Jun 04, 2019
Closed cloud systems may be the fastest growing segment of video surveillance with Meraki and Verkada. Now another California company is joining...
Bluecherry Open Sources Entire VMS on May 13, 2019
Bluecherry announced they have "released the entire Bluecherry software application open source with a GPL license". We spoke to Bluecherry's...
Verkada False Allegations Against Avigilon Exposed on May 08, 2019
Verkada has leveled false allegations against Avigilon, as part of their aggressive marketing tactics against the 'dinosaurs' in the 'ancient'...
H.265 Usage Statistics on Apr 19, 2019
H.265 has been available in IP cameras for more than 5 years and, in the past few years, the number of manufacturers supporting this codec has...
Favorite Video Storage / Server Manufacturers 2019 on Mar 25, 2019
189 integrators answered this question: "What is your favorite storage device / server manufacturer for recording video? Why?" In general...

Most Recent Industry Reports

Wyze Raises $10 Million And Seeks Services Expansion on May 27, 2020
Wyze has raised $10 million, the company's first disclosed raise since the $20 million announced at the beginning of 2019. Inside this note,...
Startup Videoloft Presents Cloud Storage on May 27, 2020
Videoloft presented offsite cloud storage at the May 2020 IPVM Startups show. A 30-minute video from Videoloft including IPVM...
Directory of 250+ Fever Camera News Reports Globally on May 27, 2020
This global directory tracks 250+ articles about thermal cameras used to detect fevers in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Articles are...
Integrators Rising Against Coronavirus on May 27, 2020
IPVM integrator statistics make it clear - Coronavirus's impact on business is lessening and many are anticipating even better news in weeks...
Netposa Stock Surges 46% After US Human Rights Abuse Sanctions on May 27, 2020
Last Friday, the US government announced it would sanction PRC video management provider NetPosa for being "complicit in human rights violations...
LILIN Presents NDAA-Compliant P2 Cameras on May 26, 2020
Merit LILIN presented its NDAA-compliant P2 camera series at the April 2020 IPVM New Products show. Inside this report: A 30-minute video...
ZKTeco Body Temperature and Mask Detection Reader Tested on May 26, 2020
While dedicated fever cameras emerged first, now tablet/kiosk fever detectors are ramping up. China's ZKTeco has been aggressively promoting such...
IDIS Presents 12MP IR Panoramic Fisheye on May 26, 2020
IDIS presented its 12MP IR panoramic fisheye camera at the April 2020 IPVM New Products show. Inside this report: A 30-minute video from...
FDA Defines Correct Operation of "Fever Cameras" on May 26, 2020
The US FDA has now defined the correct operation of "Thermal Imaging Systems", colloquially known as "fever cameras". Many in video...
OnSSI Founders Return, Start Corsight on May 25, 2020
The OnSSI founders are back, less than 2 years after selling OnSSI to Qognify, they have returned to Corsight, a spin-out of an Israeli AI...