Nirvanix Success Attracts Funding And New Executive Leadership

Today Nirvanix announced that it has secured additional funding of $10 million dollars and has appointed Scott Genereux as President, and Chief Executive Officer. These developments are designed to fortify the company's competitive position and expand the market penetration of its Storage Delivery Network (SDN) on a massive global scale. Genereux's successful track record of building business value propositions around storage solutions bodes well for Nirvanix as the company starts to penetrate new markets and attempts to take market share from traditional storage vendors and other cloud storage providers.

In my opinion, there's no doubt about the compelling economics involved, and that technology advancements over the past few years will enable companies such as Nirvanix to capitalize on the growing necessity for cloud storage solutions. With an equation that consists of an additional $10 million dollars in funding, plus the addition of a seasoned and successful chief executive with storage sales and marketing experience, the sum will lead to creative and cost effective offerings for IT enterprises, expanded channel sales opportunities, and solid revenue growth for Nirvanix.

From its beginning in 2007, San Diego, California based Nirvanix has taken a different approach to providing enterprise class storage. The Nirvanix approach is from the enterprise cloud perspective. The company recognized a confluence of multiple factors driving business IT requirements, and has literally been at the right place at the right time with regard to challenges in the global macroeconomic condition. Business IT departments are under heavy pressure to reduce expenditures for IT equipment, drastically reduce costly energy consumption, and find new methods to store business critical information while quickly running out of precious floor space. Nirvanix has provided IT enterprises with much needed breathing room via storage capacity strategically located around the world at its SDN node locations.

The Nirvanix global SDN infrastructure spans multiple continents and includes nodes in New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, Germany, and Japan. The company's storage exists under one global namespace and supports millions of users and billions of files across its intelligent distributed file system. User content spans from 1 gigabyte to multiple petabytes under management. The company reports that it consistently uses storage best practices so that it can manage information availability at greater than five nines (99.999 percent up time) and claims 90 percent storage utilization efficiency in it Los Angeles and New York nodes.

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Scott Genereux, and we discussed the kinds of solutions that Nirvanix has provided to businesses for their growing unstructured data storage requirements. Genereux states, "One such business, a leading Fortune 100 media company, has made the business decision to stop physically moving movie canisters around and to move their massive motion picture content to the cloud." This business decision now moves the responsibility for safely storing the media company's business critical information to the Nirvanix SDN. "This represents petabytes of initially stored online information and approximately 150 terabytes of continued storage consumption per month," said Genereux. This Nirvanix customer now has the choice of how many copies of managed content they would like to have and on which node locations they would like it spread across within the SDN.This methodology enables Nirvanix clients to rapidly access their content from any geographical node location. For the Fortune 100 media company discussed here, their valuable, re-playable, content can be quickly accessed and delivered anywhere around the world. It's easy to see how this client has avoided costly server and storage infrastructure and now has their content both safely stored in the cloud and available for any business purpose they desire, including revenue generation via content distribution.

From the backup and restore perspective, Nirvanix has recently partnered with Symantec for the deployment of Symantec's NetBackup and Backup Exec capability. "Essentially, backup can now be as simple as pressing the Cloud Backup button within NetBackup and client backups will be automatically directed to the Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network," said Genereux. In my opinion, from a enterprise storage perspective, this capability will be highly attractive to Nirvanix enterprise prospects who are looking to automate and simplify the continually nagging backup requirement, and who demand the ability to restore to a granular level.

Nirvanix sees itself competing with the likes of EMC and its Atmos cloud storage offering along with EMC's partners such as AT&T. Additionally, the company sees Amazon S3 out there on the competitive landscape. However, Nirvanix believes Atmos and its partner services providers are over priced for the existing, and growing, enterprise class private and public cloud business requirements. The company views Amazon S3 as a successful offering, however it views S3 more as a development, or engineering grade services offering. "Others, such as Amazon and Atmos based offerings, are additions to their respective company core competencies. As for us, enterprise class cloud storage is our core competency as is our methodology for the storage deliver network," explains Genereux.

I asked Scott Genereux if he believed as I do that the time to execute on cloud offerings is now. "Yes, the cloud is now. Enterprise class customers now have the technology, bandwidth, and security available to them to more effectively leverage the cloud and lessen their infrastructure burdens. With Nirvanix, customers have a new and different tier of storage available to them," explained Genereux.

At the time this blog was posted, Amazon, EMC, and Nirvanix were not clients of Tom Trainer, or Analytico, Inc.