Nirvanix Cloud Storage Vs. HDD Shortages

Nirvanix, Inc. announced that at a time of disk drive shortages and sharp price increases it is prepared to meet the global market demand for enterprise and SMB storage requirements with its portfolio of cloud storage services with usage-based pricing.

By shifting to the cloud, Nirvanix has found its customers save up to 70% over conventional storage systems and are provided with a level of efficiency that companies can’t achieve on their own.

With hard disk drive manufacturers posting record profits and the scarcity of high density drives that is expected to continue throughout 2012, fully managed cloud storage services are becoming increasingly viable alternatives. Acquiring more drives means a lot more data center infrastructure plus power consumption, cooling, switches, cables, conduit, racks, floor space, and maintenance. Inevitably, it leads to the never ending technology refresh cycles and data migration that plagues all storage systems reaching their end of life (EOL).

"Cloud storage not only enables IT organizations to shift to a pay-by-the-drink business model for their storage resources, but it also provides them with business-enabling capabilities that just can’t be achieved with conventional disk storage," said Marc Staimer, President of Dragon Slayer Consulting. "With the Nirvanix cloud, companies get continuous data access achieved by multiple live replicas spread across a global grid, enabling work-flow sharing and content collaboration across multiple diverse locations while maintaining data consistency. Clearly the shift to big clouds for big data makes more economic sense now than ever before."

Cloud storage introduces a different cost paradigm. Users only pay for capacity actually utilized, not for RAID overhead-which can be north of 40% in a single disk storage system-or metadata storage, orphaned storage or simple unutilized storage. Cloud storage makes storage capacity, availability and bandwidth resources available on demand, meaning higher user productivity and accelerated product time-to-market with the elimination of procurement cycles, installation hassles and extended wait times for disk drive manufacturers to have product available at increasingly higher prices.

The Nirvanix Cloud Storage Network, a global grid of data centers that span Los Angeles, Dallas, New Jersey, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Switzerland, and Hawaii enables customers to access petabytes of cloud storage capacity on demand and benefit from the transparent movement of data from one region to another with no impact to their business operations.

"Industry researchers believe that the prices for high density disk drives will not go back down in the next 18-24 months," said Scott Genereux, president and CEO of Nirvanix. "At times like these, the elastic flexibility of a fully managed cloud services model enables companies to lower their operational and acquisition costs and achieve more than is possible from disk storage systems alone. The movement to cloud storage services represents a once in a generation paradigm shift with an inflection point that’s here and now."

Nirvanix offers fully managed cloud storage services with usage-based pricing-available in public, hybrid and private cloud deployment options.

Consistent Data Storage on the Internet
Nirvanix has a cloud storage technology that knows where every single object in the cloud is located at any point in time by virtue of data consistency software. It ensures that there are no consistency windows for companies to deal with as changes to a file are immediately reflected across the whole cloud and not at some future point in time.

A Geo-Diverse, Global Namespace
Nirvanix has a cloud storage service with a geo-diverse, global namespace that spans countries, regions, data centers and pools all data into a single globally accessible repository. Others either offer ‘cloud-in-a-box,’ are limited by regional namespaces or confined to a single physical data center. The global namespace creates a logical pool across all deployed nodes in a public, hybrid or private cloud implementation.

Nirvanix Cloud File System
Specifically designed to handle millions of users, billions of files and exabytes of data, the Nirvanix Cloud File System is architected to accommodate massive unstructured content files that are prevalent in healthcare, media and entertainment, finance, biotech and IT industries.