back to article Cloud storage biz, one careful owner, six years on the clock... any takers?

Cloud storage startup Nirvanix has imploded, with Brit-based partner Aorta Cloud reacting fast in prepping a takeover to continue services for Nirvanix's customers. All parties are hoping that this doesn't give customers the dreaded "cloud fear" and that Amazon, Google and Microsoft don't become the sole holy trinity of cloud …

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  1. jas42

    Yup going to the cloud is inevitable !

    Oh yes - everybody should move to the cloud - its inevitable - not!

    Great I have only 2 weeks to get my data back - and these guys were targeting enterprise customers!

    The bottom line is that only Amazon and Microsoft and probably Google are sure to survive in this space - Rackspace appears to be struggling. So much for choice.

    The fact is while quite a lot of people are dabbling in the (public) cloud the biggest consumers are orgs like dropbox not end users

    I'll be keeping the majority of my data in-house, thanks.

    1. InsaneGeek

      Re: Yup going to the cloud is inevitable !

      I wouldn't say that "Amazon and Microsoft and probably Google are sure to survive". Nirvanix was around for ~6 years, from my experience all I'd I'd say that in the IT business there aren't any guarantees what will be left standing in the wake of change 6 years from now. In 2003 did anybody think Sun would be flailing so badly and sell itself off 6 years later to Oracle in 2009? There are no sure bets, if you need to make a bet, the best thing to do is hedge them and plan for something bad to happen eventually to your provider and either keep a copy of your dataset on premise or across cloud providers.

      IT has a huge boneyard of riddled corpses from once huge won't fail companies: Wang, Sequent, SGI, Digital, Novell, Netscape, Cray, Burrows...

  2. Matt Bryant Silver badge
    Pirate

    Data out by the end of September?

    Seeing as most of the vendors typically take three weeks to turn around an array order, the only viable option would seem to be migration to another cloud storage provider. I bet none of the customers kept a second copy on tape or another cloud because they probably thought "It's in the cloud, we don't need to". Doh!

  3. Nate Amsden

    how it happened

    "We seem to find ourselves in the 'honest broker' role - not quite sure how that happened!"

    Answer: because nobody else cared(sadly enough I suppose)

  4. cloudguy

    Nirvanix was doomed from the start...

    Well, the Nirvanix failed for 3 plausible reasons according to Simon Robinson from 451 Research. To paraphrase his analysis...1) The Nirvanix business model was too capital intensive for what the company was charging and the company eventually burned through its cash. 2) The Nirvanix "Cloud File System" software did not scale-out as well as they were expecting. This eventually became problematic because Nirvanix needed to scale-out to keep growing in order to run with the big dogs. 3) Nirvanix did not evolve beyond its initial storage service offering. This limited the extent to which customers could grow in their use of cloud infrastructure with Nirvanix.

    The cautionary tale is customers need to develop an "exit strategy" or have a contingency plan ready when a Nirvanix-like implosion happens. Cloud service providers like Nirvanix are not without blame when they are "working without a safety net" in their business. Cloud service providers should have a capital reserve fund or insurance to wind down their business if it must be shuttered. The "customer-be-damned" attitude doesn't work in the cloud and it will invite government regulation if this type of behavior is repeated. I applaud the efforts being made by Aorta Cloud/Capital to keep Nirvanix operating so customers can have the opportunity to make decisions about what to do regarding their data stored at Nirvanix.

  5. Franko Davidson
    FAIL

    Lessons Learned?

    I don't know how to put this, but that is the risk you take when doing business with any company that is running venture capital. They could go out of business at any point. Like the de-motivational poster with at picture of the Titanic on it says "Sometimes your role in life is to be a warning to others"

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