The End of Nirvanix

Less than two weeks ago (September 18th), Nirvanix made an announcement to their thousands of enterprise customers that they are “winding down,” and “suggest” that their users find alternative storage arrangements by the 30th. Yesterday, the cloud storage provider changed their homepage to a disclaimer recommending alternative solutions like Amazon Web Services and Azure. The anticipated finalization of the company wind-down is October 15th.

Of course, cloud providers are doing anything and everything in their power to swoop up the potential users; extending a helping hand in this time of need. Rackspace has even implemented a promotion offering a free month of storage to the victims of the company’s closure (a charitable gesture from the cloud powerhouse that revenues over 1.3 billion dollars. Technical officers at AWS are working with many of the Nirvanix enterprise users that were restricted by mere bandwidth capabilities in the 10-day period they had to transfer their data. For customers with petabytes (that’s right, petabytes) of precision information, this is of much greater value than essentially extending a coupon.

Those who are familiar with the industry could not believe what they were reading when Nirvanix provided less than two weeks to their thousands of customers to transfer their data. For those of you that do not understand the mission impossible this creates against the bandwidth capabilities; 1GB of data can take several hours to download, and a single petabyte consists of 1,048,576 gigabytes. With all of these users going crazy to download their information through the same servers at the same time; no doubt there are going to be some serious issue.

Like the others, DriveHQ technical team is eager to help any Nirvanix users that are attempting to transfer their cloud material. In addition to helping you through every step of the data transferral process, we at DriveHQ are extending a 40 percent discount to all NIrvanix users. We understand more than anyone how difficult it will be to trust your information to another cloud provider after such a dismal experience. However, if there is one thing we have learned in our decade of providing cloud solutions, it’s that trust can only be established through a track-record of outstanding service; something you will not receive with many of the providers out there.

It is difficult to identify exactly what set of events set in motion the end of Nirvanix, though industry experts have tossed out a few possible explanations.
One of the first points mentioned is the fact that Nirvanix never evolved their services beyond basic online cloud storage. Simultaneously other companies were taking their services and expanding their solutions to compete with AWS and like versatile competitors. IBM – one company that had a long going partnership with Nirvanix – essentially ended their relationship with the storage provider with their acquisition of SoftLayer, which offers cloud storage as one of their services. Nirvanix is a shining example that such storage-only-service is not enough to differentiate themselves against the larger public clouds or traditional storage systems vendors (EMC, IBM, NetApp, HP, etc.); especially when they too are bragging about their economic scalability. IT seems that Nirvanix will go down as a reminder for future IT startups: innovate or die.