Cloud Service Provider, Nirvanix is closing its cloud services, and has given a short two weeks’ notice to its customers so that they can retrieve their data and move it to some other cloud service provider. But what’s more surprising is that the company hasn’t mentioned anything on its website about the service shutdown. Reportedly, Nirvanix has been informing its customers and partners that they can no longer replicate their storage or upload any more data to the Nirvanix cloud.
San Diego-based cloud storage provider Nirvanix was founded in 2007, and ever since it has got several big and small enterprises using its public, hybrid, and private cloud storage services. The company also raised $70 million in venture capital funding, including a $25 million Series C round last May led by Khosla Ventures.
Nirvanix has given a notice period till October 15 to retrieve their data from the cloud service, but with petabytes of data being hosted for a large number of geographically spread-out companies, the transfer and retrieval of data in such small time frame looks challenging. Not only customer, but companies having partnership with Nirvanix are also going to suffer. For instance, IBM uses the Nirvanix cloud storage technology in its SmartCloud Enterprise portfolio, and other vendors such as Dell, HP, Riverbed, Symantec, and TwinStrata have sourced their cloud storage from Nirvanix when offering their own services.
When relying on cloud services it is important to have a backup plan–or at least a way out should the service become untenable. In the wake of the news of Nirvanix shutting down opinions have begun to rise about how to prepare for and handle such an event. Forrester‘s Henry Baltazar emphasizes the need to tap services with large pipes and easy data movement capability. And over at Gartner, Kyle Hilgendorf outlined the basic need for what he calls a “cloud exit strategy,” using the Nirvanix closure as a backdrop.
Though the reasons of Nirvanix service shutdown are not clear, it could be anything related to increased competition, which is causing prices to decline and profit margins to shrink.
Last year too, the company gave its customers the option to evacuate data from its cloud, as a reaction to Hurricane Sandy. Nirvanix evacuated its New Jersey data center and moved to other location. Earlier this year, Nirvanix announced that its flagship cloud storage offering will be available through the Intel AppUp SMB Service, a subscription-based hybrid cloud solution. The step was taken under the direction of CEO Dru Borden, who joined the board in December 2012.