Nirvanix to Challenge Amazon in the Emerging Online Storage Market
Amazon is probably the biggest name in the emerging online storage market, but new competition is coming from a startup named Nirvanix Inc. that built a storage service to accommodate vast increases in digital media content fueled by the growing popularity of Web 2.0 applications.
Nirvanix was founded one year ago and made its Storage Delivery Service generally available in October.
“The box model is dead,” claims founder and CEO Patrick Harr. Harr admits that storage giants like EMC still make a good buck, but he predicts that customers will increasingly see there’s little competitive advantage to operating storage in-house when you can do it “in the cloud.”
Nirvanix is backed by Intel’s capital investment arm and several other venture capital firms.
“Nirvanix has clearly targeted Amazon’s S3 [Simple Storage Service] for competition,” analyst Deni Connor, a former Network World writer who recently started the analyst firm Storage Strategies NOW, wrote in an e-mail. “Both companies focus on developers and businesses at procuring secure storage for their Web applications and content. Whether Nirvanix will be able to compete with Amazon’s S3 remains to be seen, but Storage 2.0 Web companies like Nirvanix stand a real chance in the industry of doing something great — providing scalable and secure storage without the capital expense of buying it.”
