Cloud storage is proving to be a tough environment after one service provider warned it is to close its operations, and consequently customers need to move their data.
Advertising Age reported 17 September that San Diego, Calif.-based Nirvanix has told its customers it is shutting down its operation on 30 September. This gives customers a mere two weeks to move their data elsewhere.
As of late 17 September, Nirvanix had not commented on the situation.
Nirvanix made a positioning point about enabling customers to know geographically where their data resided in its worldwide network. However, it is still no easy nor simple task to move terabytes or petabytes of data from one cloud provider to another – or to a data centre.
Steven Ampleford, chief executive of Aorta Cloud and Aorta Capital, a Nirvanix partner, told VentureBeat that said he received a phone call from Nirvanix officials with the news on 16 September.
“Armageddon is about to happen,” Ampleford said. Nirvanix officials didn’t tell him what would happen if customers don’t get their data out by the end of the month.
Ampleford said he was told that the company had lost its latest round of funding. Another customer said he was told that the company simply could no longer compete with major market players.
Nirvanix has previously raised $70 million (£44m) in funding from a group of VCs, including Khosla Ventures, Valhalla Partners, Intel Capital, Mission Ventures, and Windward Ventures. Its last round was for $25 million (£15.7m), in May 2012.
“Nirvanix’s premature demise demonstrates that one size does not fit all,” CEO Liran Eshel of independent cloud storage provider CTERA told eWEEK.
“Nirvanix was trying to go for the high end of the enterprise market, but couldn’t differentiate itself enough to justify its aspirations. With Amazon setting the tone for large volume, bread and butter storage, and bundling it with a full compute stack, other service providers must differentiate their offerings by either verticalising them, making them part of a fully managed service, or by delivering high value integrated application support for specific use cases like backup, DR, ROBO storage or file sync & share.”
Nasuni CEO Andres Rodriguez told eWEEK that the Nirvanix news “shows that, unless you do your homework, cloud storage can still be a scary place.
“Our ongoing testing of public cloud storage providers show that, right now, there are only two that meet enterprise standards for reliability and performance: Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure. And even with these two providers, we’ve developed backstops like cloud mirroring in case of failure. Cloud storage is definitely enterprise-ready, but only if you use an enterprise-ready service.”
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Originally published on eWeek.
Originally published on eWeek.
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Cloud like any market will have winners and losers and customers need to do diligence on their provider which should include off boarding meaning how easy is it to get your data back in a usable format and move elsewhere should you choose or need, Good cloud providers will make this easy and are open and up front about their provision for this,. Cloud is a long term play as a provider , not a quick buck market and unless you differentiate the customer value you deliver you can rapidly become marginalised and commoditised. The issue in this case is the lack of time allowed to their customers to take the required action due to not provisioning contingency into their own business models ahead of time. Cloud in the majority is a highly positive outcome for the customer, their will be exceptions like this along the journey of cloud evolution as there was in the product world.
Ian Moyse
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