Nirvanix bankruptcy: The collapse of the Cloud
Nirvanix is or rather was a visionary Cloud Storage company, which started before or at the same time as AWS S3, offered customers all over the world excellent cloud storage systems, perhaps expensive compared to the interest of the market at that time, but certainly had unique features, such as NFS and CIFS protocols if I remember correctly, In addition to the webDAV that we are all used to.
Now it has gone bankrupt and on their website there is a statement inviting customers to “migrate” their data elsewhere, to its former competitors.
Here is the press release:
What does all this involve? For organized companies, it’s just a nuisance of having to move data elsewhere, readjust the SW that used those resources, reorganize a bit. Surely the migration will not have been painless for many and here surely many will have traced their hand on the problem of the Cloud Computing standard, on vendor lock-in, on interoperability between clouds.
It is certainly a scenario that should make you think, there are many cloud providers that may suffer the same fate in the near future, as the market, especially in cloud storage, is saturated with offers. Those most at risk are providers with their own HW infrastructure, those that, as many already do, use the storage of the big players, such as S3 (see dropbox), are much more elastic and can react very well to the market.
In short, today there is the shutdown of the US administration, there may also be the shutdown of Nirvanix.
