Cloud Chaos: Nirvanix Shuts Down

When most of us think of “Cloud” in the context of “Disasters”, we see opportunity.  Cloud storage offers us a geo-redundant landing platform where we can place data to achieve far greater resiliency at a much lower price point than most organizations can achieve on their own.   For most of us, “Cloud” means protection from “Disasters”; the “Easy Button” for DR.

Nirvanix customers Monday awoke to a whole new type of disaster.  In this nightmare, the very geo-redundant, ultra-resilient platform they entrusted to store petabytes of their data will be turned off in as little as two weeks.  Customers now have to coordinate the movement of massive datasets from the Nirvanix cloud to private capacity or new public offerings in an impossible timeframe.

Let this scenario be a lesson to all of us.  We are still in the gold rush of “cloud” computing.  IT Service Providers, particularly IaaS, are birthed, bought and die at a rapid pace.  There is 10X more “cloud” supply than there is demand, the market will continue to correct itself, and customers will ride the torrent.

If you are considering participating in this market, you better be certain of the financial situation of the company you trust your data business to.  The market place is far more volatile than providers let on.