With the increase in popularity and awareness of cloud based services here’s an interesting company that offers large scale global storage solutions out in the cloud. I first heard of this San Diego based company called Nirvanix whilst attending the Tech Field Day late last year.

Via their globally disbursed and interconnected storage delivery network (SDN) nirvanix offers a number of offsite storage based services and solutions.  The SDN “intelligently stores, delivers and processes storage requests in the best network location, providing the optimal user experience”.  According to Nirvanix a true cloud based storage provider such as themselves must offer the following four key components:  Global virtualization, unlimited scalability, continuous availability and a usage based service. 

I had the opportunity to catch up with Nirvanix’s Product Manager, Peter Pistek to find out more about their products and service offerings.

The Nirvanix product that really caught my attention is the ‘CloudNAS’ which presents cloud based storage via a ‘mount point’ on a local server (physical or virtual) to an application, service or end user.  By using this service a company is provided with a global NAS solution which is accessible via CIFS, NFS, or FTP.  Data can be transferred between the globally disbursed sites via the SDN with the transfer of this data between nodes being securely encrypted through the use of AES 256-bit encryption.

This is all managed via the Nirvanix Management Portal (NMP) which provides a straight forward view into the service status, account features, usage and the costs.

It is quite refreshing to see a product that’s being marketed as a ‘cloud’ solution actually having, in my opinion, cloud-like qualities and functionality.  With all the marketing hype over the last couple of past years around ‘The Cloud’ we have seen plenty of half-baked supposed cloud solutions.  For me the CloudNas proves that moving data around globally via the cloud doesn’t have to be (at least not for the end user) a complex process.  No doubt in time more and more diverse cloud based offerings will come to market with the level of simplicity around the use and management seen in Nirvanix’s CloudNAS.

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