Nirvanix yesterday filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
According to an announcement on their website:
“We have an agreement with IBM, and a team from IBM is ready to help you. In addition, we have established a higher speed connection with some companies to increase the rate of data transfer from Nirvanix to their servers.”
Customers have until October 15 to move their data elsewhere.
Read earlier posts on the Nirvanix shutdown: the what and the why.
The sudden shutdown of Nirvanix, an early but recently faltering participant in the “pure-play” Online Storage space dominated by the likes of AWS S3, Microsoft Azure and Google, is in large part a result of downward pressure on prices as the big players continually lower theirs. Amazon, for instance, launched S3 in 2006 and charged $0.15 per gigabyte-month. After many step-wise price cuts S3 is down to $0.095 per gigabyte-month.
Pure online storage is fast becoming the sole province of vendors who either enjoy economies of scale, or who treat their offerings as a loss-leader to get other business (or a combination of both).
Smaller players may have to add value in other ways to survive. Nirvanix was not profitable, and when their latest round of funding came up short it was the last nail in their coffin.
According to a report today in Information Age:
“US-based cloud storage provider Nirvanix tells employees it has “gone to the wall”, gives customers until the end of the month to move their data elsewhere .”
The company was founded in 2007 after an online storage company called StreamLoad split into consumer and business units. Not longer after, the consumer arm – MediaMax – gave customers one month to relocate their data following a botched migration onto the Nirvanix platform.
DRFortress, a Hawain colocation and cloud services provider, today announced that it has launched DRFcloud, a local, pay-as-you-use, cloud computing services based in the State and available throughout the Pacific Rim. This new service, offered in partnership with IaaS pioneer, Appcore, follows the successful start of the Nirvanix cloud storage service. Continuing to demonstrate leadership in the shift to the cloud in Hawaii, both the DRFcloud and the Nirvanix cloud storage hybrid node are maintained at the DRFortress datacenter in Hawaii with redundant mainland nodes for disaster recovery purposes.
“DRFortress has demonstrated extraordinary vision in delivering the first ‘On-Demand, Pay-by-the-Drink’ Cloud Storage and now the same for Cloud Computing Services to Hawaii,” said Marc Staimer, president of Dragon Slayer Consulting. “Hawaii IT organizations are now able to cost effectively take advantage of the cloud services revolution knowing their data and applications will be always be available regardless of local conditions.”
“Previously, Hawaii organizations interested in pay-as-you-use cloud computing were forced to use a Mainland provider, buy hardware boxes and pay maintenance fees or commit to a long term contract with a local virtualization firm,” said Fred Rodi, President, DRFortress. “With our new DRFcloud computing service, we have revolutionized Hawaii’s cloud market by introducing no contract, pay-as-you-need, on-demand utility computing. Clients only pay for the computing power they actually use. In this time of tight budgets businesses and government agencies are increasingly turning to cloud computing as a means of providing flexible computing resources while lowering capital expenses.”
Cloud computing is the most significant advancement in information technology today. According to leading industry analysts, the size of the cloud computing market is expected to be $150 billion by 2013. To gain significant share in this market, DRFortress is employing industry-leading technologies in the new DRFcloud service. With this service, entities of all sizes can implement their own private networks using virtual servers with nothing more than a few mouse-clicks. Companies can self-provision this new service instantaneously online through the DRFortress secure management portal at www.drfcloud.com.
“We are pleased to partner with DRFortress to bring local speed, turn-key cloud solutions to Hawaii and the Pacific Rim,” commented Brian Donaghy, Appcore CEO. “Now service providers and IT departments will be able to use Appcore Onsite™ to launch applications and cloud servers on demand with the click of a single button.”
While security is often mentioned as the number one issue holding businesses back from moving to the cloud, DRFortress addresses this concern by selecting technologies and partners who are able to deliver enterprise-class security and reliability proven in real-world production environments. In addition to DRFortress’ world-class secured datacenter, the company’s partners—Nirvanix and Appcore—have extensive processes and architectures in place to meet customers’ regulatory and business needs.
