This is sexy technology! How sexy? I can foresee one of the larger OEMs integrating it with existing storage system offerings and making a big push against EMC in the battle for the private cloud. Speaking of "the journey to the private cloud," I believe that it's not just about the journey to the private cloud, it's about the flexibility to deploy any cloud storage required to support business needs. A business may have needs for a public cloud and a private cloud and/or a hybrid cloud. But just building a private cloud is not the only answer.
Regardless of cloud type, Nirvanix is making it clear that it is cloud-agnostic, and, from what I've seen, major customers, such as Hollywood film studios and Fortune 500 companies, are putting their enterprise weight behind the cloud and moving their data to the Nirvanix cloud infrastructure at an increasingly rapid rate, demonstrating that they agree with this flexible approach to cloud storage. In essence, they are voting with their dollars and electing a cloud storage partner. Make no mistake, we are talking about extremely large corporations moving their digital assets to the cloud, and they are moving in the Nirvanix direction. I am one that loves to speak to customers and quote them in my blogs. However, these customers see this technology as "their" competitive weapon, and they are reluctant to be quoted. It's understandable given the stakes involved.
Part of Nirvanix's ability to attract the larger enterprise customers can be attributed to its dedicated focus on cloud storage services. While others are trying to be the jacks of all trades--trying to do virtualization hosting, software hosting and compute hosting--storage becomes an afterthought. They subsequently become the master of none. Nirvanix, however, has a singular focus, a singular vision--cloud storage--and I believe that focus is helping to fuel the company's success with large clients.
The second element of its recent traction has to do with performance. More often than not, the customers who selected Nirvanix have run extensive benchmarks in real-world environments and found that Nirvanix solutions outperform offerings from the likes of EMC Atmos and Rackspace in terms of sheer bandwidth, scalability and redundancy. In the words of a large Hollywood studio that selected Nirvanix over EMC Atmos and IBM Global Services, Nirvanix is a "true enterprise solution with rapid deployment, multiple storage locations, and is easy to manage with policy-based replication." The cloud space is getting increasingly hot, and I expect that 2011 will be an explosive year for cloud deployments, partnerships and acquisitions. I'll continue to monitor interesting moves made by the key players in this space, and blog about these moves throughout the year.
(At the time this blog was written, EMC, IBM and Nirvanix were not clients of Tom
Trainer or Analytico)
