Nirvanix
Beyond Online Storage

Businesses don't generate their own electricity, and Nirvanix CEO Patrick Harr argues they shouldn't have to provide their own storage, either. A storage system in the cloud can be used as a utility, he says. "You can scale on demand. You don't have to worry about disks going bad, about maintenance."

Nirvanix is different from online backup services; its Storage Delivery Network is built on a proprietary virtualized file system, Harr says. In a typical online storage offering, a customer's application writes to a namespace associated with a physical system. If that system changes, the app has to write to a new target. By contrast, SDN appears to applications as one drive, when in fact data may be written across multiple drives in different locations.

When applications call on data stored in the cloud, Nirvanix can deliver it from the closest data center, improving response time. Customers also can add storage on the fly without having to change the address an application uses.

Nirvanix designed its infrastructure as a Web service so that businesses can create applications that use the SDN--an approach similar to Amazon's Simple Storage Service. Nirvanix offers service-level agreements with 99.9% to 100% uptime and availability, which is almost unheard of in services.

Since it was launched last year, Nirvanix has landed $18 million in venture funding and claims to have some 450 customers. In June, the company announced a partnership with Atempo, an archiving software provider. Atempo's file archiving software integrates with Nirvanix so that companies using the software can archive files locally or in the cloud. This would appeal to companies with long-term retention requirements because they can add storage on demand to cope with growing data volumes.

Nirvanix also is trying to get beyond a problem in its past. It was created out of Streamland, a struggling online consumer backup service. When he came in as CEO, Harr positioned Nirvanix as an enterprise vendor built on new technology. Streamland, run by a separate CEO, was renamed MediaMax, then relaunched as The Linkup. But that business closed in August, leaving many customers without access to their data.

Nirvanix has the hardware that contains that data but can't get at the data without The Linkup's application, and Nirvanix doesn't have it, Harr says. The debacle is a reminder of what can go wrong with cloud computing. Former customers of The Linkup are still fuming.

Harr is keeping his focus on the enterprise. "Businesses want to get out of managing storage, and back to managing their business," he says.

-- Andrew Conry-Murray

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