Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) company Pivot3 rolled out new technology partners, bragged about the performance of its Acuity platform, and released the latest version of its HCI software in a series of announcements this week.

The company launched its HCI platform in April.

Earlier this week Pivot3 touted comparison testing that showed Acuity performed better, has higher density per node with less hardware, and responds faster to applications, compared to competitors’ HCI products.

Who are these competitors? It’s a crowded sector with major players including Nutanix, VMware, Dell EMC, Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprises (HPE), and Microsoft offering their own HCI systems and software.

“Although I’m unable to provide exact competitors, we tested Acuity against conventional HCI vendors, not old-school products,” Ben Bolles, vice president of product at Pivot3, said in an email regarding its rivals. “The comparisons we made were our own Acuity lab results versus publicly available competitive information.”

The company calls its system “priority-aware” HCI. By that it means the platform has a policy-based management system that determines which applications have the highest priority.

It combines a nonvolatile memory express (NVMe) flash data path — NVMe is super-fast flash technology — with a quality of service (QoS) engine, which Bolles said is key to the platform’s performance. “There are multiple aspects of Pivot3’s QoS that make it more sophisticated than other vendors,” he said. “For us, it’s four different things.”

First is the policy-management system that means customers don’t have to manage individual objects.

Second, this prioritization is built into the system. “This provides a level of intelligence and automation to prioritize mission-critical workloads over noncritical workloads,” he said.

Third, the QoS provides real-time data placement, automatically deciding if the data is placed in NVMe flash or lower-performing tiers.

“Finally, we wrap our QoS engine around data-protection services, so customers can easily set up snapshots, scheduling, retention policies, and things of that nature,” Bolles said.

The company also partnered with HyTrust, Veeam, and Liquidware to develop products based on its Acuity platform.

With security company HyTrust, Pivot3 will combine its QoS engine with HyTrust’s workload-centric encryption software. Bolles said this ensures the security and performance for virtual machines (VMs) that access sensitive data. “This allows customer to have more control of their system in a secure, multitenant environment, while incorporating policy-based management,” he said.

Veeam targets its Cloud Connect disaster-recovery-as-a-service product to service providers. The joint product, also geared toward service providers, will give them access to better backup capabilities, Bolles said. “An example would be utilizing the Veeam Cloud Connect capabilities to deliver a fast and secure disaster recovery solution for on-prem to cloud DR.”

With virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) company Liquidware, Pivot3 aims to improve its VDI for customers. “This partnership will benefit companies looking to implement VDI for the first time or address issues with their existing infrastructure without impacting cost or user experience,” Bolles said.

And finally, Pivot3 this week expanded its channel partnership program.

Pivot3’s announcements coincide with other HCI-related news coming out of VMworld 2017. This includes new Dell EMC HCI systems with more embedded VMware software.