Nirvanix Tells Cloud Storage Customers: Move Your Data

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The cloud storage market appeared to be consolidating around market leaders as Nirvanix, a San Diego-based pioneer in the field, reportedly started advising customers to move their data elsewhere.

Attempts to contact both corporate public relations and the office of the CEO Debra Chrapaty at Nirvanix went unanswered, but InformationWeek's sister publication, CRN, reported Tuesday that Nirvanix partners have been informed of the company's need to find more funding within days or close down.

In addition, Nirvanix is informing its cloud partners that starting Wednesday their customers will no longer be able to replicate their storage to the Nirvanix cloud, CRN reported.

Its account followed on the heels of the U.K.'s InformationAge story Monday that Nirvanix partner Aorta Cloud, a U.K. service provider, had been informed by Nirvanix executives that it has "gone to the wall" on its financing and a shutdown would have to kick in by Sept. 30.

[ Looking for insights into the cloud storage price wars? See Google Counters Amazon Storage Price Cut. ]

Steve Ampleford, CEO of Aorta Cloud, a U.K. service provider, is exploring the possibility of finding new funding for Nirvanix. "We are seeing if there is a chance to keep Nirvanix going," he told InformationAge, an online publication for IT managers, Monday. His firm also runs a boutique venture capital operation, Aorta Capital.

For customers using petabytes of Nirvanix storage, the pending two-week deadline to vacate might not be enough time. Data movements in the cloud are dependent on the speed with which the service provider can write data to an external source and the amount of bandwidth made available to do so.

A test of various services by Nasuni, a Nirvanix competitor, found that moving 12 TB of data from one Amazon S3 bucket to another took four hours. Moving the same amount from Amazon S3 to Microsoft Azure took 40 hours, and from S3 to Rackspace, "just under one week." Moving data from Rackspace into Amazon took only five hours.

Nirvanix is a storage service layered on top of several other cloud service providers as well as its own data center. It added Switch SuperNAP in Las Vegas to its global network of 10 data centers in June 2012.