Experience Makes The Difference At Nirvanix

From the May 11, 2009 issue of InformationWeek

Nirvanix, an up-and-comer in cloud storage, provides all the services sought in DIY Marketing's request for information. Nirvanix provides a multitenant storage platform comprised of commodity hardware, augmented by its own object-oriented file system for hosting active file and archival data. Upon ingestion, file data is copied between nodes and, if desired, among three Nirvanix data centers within the United States or data centers in Japan or Germany.

Access can be made via NFS, FTP, or by means of a new SOAP/REST-over-HTTP/HTTPS API. Nirvanix provisions storage "proactively," and it insists that its business customers don't experience a lag between capacity demand and provisioning.

Global namespace and replication capabilities make Nirvanix an easy fit with DIY's geographically dispersed file sharing and project team collaboration requirements. Secure Sockets Layer connections to pre-configured Internet URLs provide an easy means for accessing stored data.

Nirvanix recommends that DIY leverage a four-node configuration that would cost about 94 cents per gigabyte per month. There are charges for uploading data ($1.26 per gigabyte per month) and for downloading data (18 cents per gigabyte per month) for this configuration. The vendor offers a service level expressed as 99.9% uptime per month and says that failure to meet its SLA will result in credits on the customer's next service bill.

The well-developed business case submitted in response to our RFI reflects the experience of Nirvanix's management team, some of whom trace their careers back to the application service provider era, where they seem to have learned some vital business lessons.

Read the complete package of stories on "Evaluating Storage-As-A-Service Options" and download the request for information that was issued to storage-as-a-service vendors here.