Cloud storage provider Nirvanix is closing its doors

Cloud service provider Nirvanix may have inadvertently validated customers’ fears centered around cloud storage. It was reported last week by U.K.-based website Information Age that Nirvanix has told its customers they have two weeks to find another home for their terabytes of data because the company was closing its doors and shutting down its service.

Founded in 2007, San Diego-based cloud storage provider Nirvanix, which targets enterprises with its public, hybrid, and private cloud storage services and usage-based pricing, had raised more than $70 million in venture capital funding, including a $25 million Series C round last May led by Khosla Ventures. Other investors in the company include Mission Ventures, Intel Capital, Valhalla Partners, and Windward Ventures.

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As of this writing, there is no information about the closure on the Nirvanix corporate website. However, numerous media and analyst reports say the company has been informing its customers and partners of its impending doom. The company is also reportedly telling its customers and partners that they can no longer replicate their storage or upload any more data to the Nirvanix cloud (probably a good call, all points considered).

Initial reports indicated that customers would have until Sept. 30 to retrieve their data from the cloud service. However, that deadline may have been extended to Oct. 15, giving customers an extra two-week reprieve. But with petabytes of data being hosted for a large number of geographically spread-out companies, the transfer and retrieval of that data will more than likely prove challenging — and that’s assuming everyone will be able to get their complete set of data.

Individual customers are not the only ones being affected with this closure. Nirvanix also has key vendor partnerships that will be impacted by the shutdown as well. 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. This latest news cuts far, wide, and deep.

According to Forrester research analyst Henry Baltazar, the news has left more than 1,000 customers scrambling to migrate stored data off the Nirvanix cloud service. In a recent Forrester blog post, Baltazar points out that the cloud provider’s demise validates warnings that it is far easier to import data into the cloud than it is to recover large quantities of data or move that data to a new provider.

“The recent example with Nirvanix highlights why customers should also consider exit and migration strategies as they formulate their cloud storage deployments,” writes Baltazar. “One of the most significant challenges in cloud storage is related to how difficult it is to move large amounts of data from a cloud. While bandwidth has increased significantly over the years, even over large network links it could take days or even weeks to retrieve terabytes or petabytes of data from a cloud. For example, on a 1Gbps link, it would take close to 13 days to retrieve 150TB of data from a cloud storage service over a WAN link.”

Given that customers were supposedly given a short two-week window to migrate all of their data, the above example might give people pause, depending on how much data they have in the cloud and how fast (or slow) their connectivity is to it.

When there is a panic or stampede to try and retrieve that data before it goes dark, that too causes another problem with overall connectivity concerns. Simultaneous connections will cause a huge traffic jam as it quickly depletes a provider’s limited network resources, and that’s going to shrink a data retrieval window even further.

Another research analyst, Kyle Hilgendorf from Gartner, also broached this subject on the Gartner blog stating his company has been receiving client inquiry requests from Nirvanix customers asking for immediate planning assistance in moving off the Nirvanix service. Is it a question of too little, too late? For quite some time now, Gartner has been advocating the importance of having a cloud exit strategy, but part of the problem, according to Hilgendorf, is that cloud exits are not nearly as sexy as cloud deployments.

As for the news about Nirvanix, Hilgendorf writes:

What are clients do to? For most — react… and react in panic. You have 2 weeks. Go! You don’t have time to worry about how much data you have stored there. You don’t have time to upgrade network connections or bandwidth. You don’t have time to order large drives or arrays to ship to the provider to get your data back. You may not even get any support from the provider! You may be facing the worst company fear — losing actual data.

Hilgendorf offers the following piece of advice to existing Nirvanix customers: “It’s too late to build a strategy. Drop whatever you are doing and get as much of the data as you can back immediately.”

While the growth in cloud adoption and its revenue stream is well established and projected by many experts to continue to grow, the cloud storage business is also experiencing increased competition, which is causing prices to decline and profit margins to shrink. As we see in the case of Nirvanix, that isn’t always a good thing for the consumer.

What happens now?

Just because things didn’t work out with Nirvanix doesn’t mean that companies using public cloud space should panic and start bringing their data back in house. Instead, companies should use this event as a learning tool. Rather than run around with your hair on fire waiting for other bad news closer to home to fall out of the sky, companies should take the time to reevaluate their own cloud exit strategy and make sure procedures are in place to quickly and quietly move to a secondary cloud provider should the need arise.

In this particular instance with Nirvanix, customers seem to have gotten at least a few weeks’ notice to find a new provider and make the transition. For others down the road, they may not be so lucky.

Think about how quickly you can pull the trigger and make a move in case your window of opportunity is less than four, three, two or even one week. Even worse, consider figuring out how long your business can survive should your cloud data completely disappear on you without any notice whatsoever. Do you have a plan in place for that scenario?

This article, “Cloud storage provider Nirvanix is closing its doors,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization and cloud computing at InfoWorld.com.