Look for new San Diego-based Nirvanix to launch in the next few weeks. It aims to compete with Amazon’s popular S3 storage web service and provide web developers another choice for online storage.
The company, which is affiliated with online storage startup MediaMax (aka Streamload), should also be announcing a $12 million round of financing in the near future. It’s not clear exactly how affiliated Nirvanix and MediaMax are, and the company is keeping the specifics of the relationship quiet for now. There has clearly been a technology swap, though, and MediaMax is now using the Nirvanix service to provide the back end of its storage product. Also, former MediaMax CEO Patrick Harr is now running the show at Nirvanix (MediaMax founder Steve Iverson has retaken the CEO spot at MediaMax).
While the company is keeping quiet about the funding and exactly how it’s affildiated with MediaMax, they are saying that they’ll be filling some of the perceived holes in S3. Hopefully they’ll be offering a service level agreement (Amazon doesn’t).
MediaMax, meanwhile, has been trying to pull through a hellish technology transition (my guess is it was related to the changeover to Nirvanix) that plagued them earlier this summer. They’ve moved their corporate blog to a new site, and are talking openly with users about some of the problems they’re facing.
Disclosure: I am an investor in Omnidrive, which is also in the online storage space and can be considered a competitor to MediaMax and Nirvanix.
For a person who has seen many hosting companies suffer from excruciating death in the bubble 1.0, I would not try any of these companies over Amazon. Let’s say I had to migrate one too many. I know Amazon has been providing this service, have figured out its true cost and can continue providing you a reliable service.
I won’t bet my start ups storage on another startup. Amazon ain’t going anywhere soon but there are no guarantees with Nirvanix. Unless they disclose their burn rate who in their right mind will bet the farm on them.
Nirvanix sounds promising. Hopefully their storage service will be faster than Amazon S3. I tried to use this service to test my broadband download/upload speed and performance of Amazon S3 is shocking. Now I am stuck with expensive CDN.
Not knowing the pedigree behind Nirvanix I would tend to agree with Darren Stuart regarding burn rate etc, although I’m going to keep a keen eye on them. It’s nice to see other people join us in competing against Amazon’s Web Services (we’re competing primarily against EC2, with real, rather than object based storage).
I do understand people’s comments regarding trusting Amazon because of their financial security, however I do also believe Amazon isn’t being open enough. They are not proving that they are backing the data up across multiple locations, or where those locations are. (This isn’t to say I don’t believe them, they just need to be more transparent about it). Nor are they giving easy access to which physical servers your ec2 images are running on, so your load balanced cluster that you run on ec2 could actually end up running on the same machine (albeit the possibility isn’t huge, it would be nice to know).
We’ve had a number of conversations with Jeff & Jinesh (AWS Evangelists) in the past about the future of the utiity computing market, and there is definately plenty of room for a number of new players to emerge.
To me, I’m waiting for the model to flip where Online Data Storage companies will PAY users to upload data to their site –and still profit.
The Online Data Storage (ODS) Company that figures this out will win much of the market, and have rich contextual advertising and marketing opportunities for this data set.
More here:
http://www.web-...to-upload-data/
It’s not like they could tell you less on their website. Big up for the *information* highway.
We’ll have to see how their services are. What exactly are the short comings of S3? I know that EC2 has a bunch of problems, such as no permanent storage and dynamic ips.
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We’re going to be kicking the tires of a UK-based service called Flexiscale which looks very promising for a number of reasons. As Tony says above, there is plenty of room for competition on the utility computing market and Amazon has had it easy for long enough.
Michael,
Is there any word on their pricing?
Quite frankly it will be hard to beat $0.15 / GB / Month from Amazon. I believe that is the main reason not many have jumped into this space yet.
Having said that I do think that a better service can be offered by bundling value added elements as Content management and media transcoding along with raw storage. I have a post here with additional thoughts.
http://abhishek...ting-ecosystem/
Abhishek
@carlity: We use S3 as our storage system for document content. We like it a lot, but there are definitely some shortcomings (nothing unreasonable, considering they are on the cutting edge here):
1. Service level agreements (no guarantees here which would provide some level of confidence on uptime, bandwith, general QOS).
2. Support services (would be nice to have the capability to have them do things like backup etc — send a backup tape to us every month, for example: clearly there would be a business model issue for Amazon here, but this can be a premium service)
3. Functional capabilities – integration with payments systems (so we can have business models based on metering and consumption), API for provisioning users (so one can build special S3 accounts that belong to the user — if the user decides to walk away from our service, we can provide the user with their own S3 account so they can take their data with them)
4. Support for lifecycle of startups – we use S3 but would like to move to a hybrid model where we can deploy appliances that also conform to the S3 api. This has important ramifications for the enterprise 2.0 space.
5. Better bandwidth consumption choices – Right now S3 behaves like a fat pipe, it can handle a lot of content, but the rate of content download is not all that high. So basically a fat, but slow pipe. This makes sense from their perspective, and how the internal architecture of S3 is structured (a distributed mesh, I guess). It would however be nice to be able to allow for fast download on some types of content — again this can be a premium service.
Basically, these are off the top of my head..I’m sure others will think of more..
Vijay,
I completely agree with your comments. They have to get better at the SLA and backup/recovery. These are typically the hidden costs in a “Managed Storage” environment.
Amazon could introduce this as a premium offering at a higher rate, which I am sure many folks would jump on. Most websites dont specifically care that much as they have no (or little) SLA to their customers.
However if a company is offering B2B services, there is no option for them but to deploy their own hardware.
Will definitely keep an eye on this. One aspect where S3 leaves much to be desired is latency. Until Amazon improves this, it is not realistic to use S3 to directly serve up static assets (images, etc..) in a high-volume environment. I have found S3 to be very useful as a first or second tier backup, but I’d love to see some sort of S3 + Akamai hybrid service launch which would not only offload the storage of content but also the serving of it.
I don’t see Amazon offering an SLA anytime soon to “counteract” this development… Whatever Nirvanix can offer in the way of reparations for subpar service levels is far outweighed by the fact that they are a tiny startup with a history of botching technology deployments, and that S3 has a record of service that is continuing to improve as days go by…
Michael, I appreciate your disclosure that you are not a independent observer of these events. That admission was due.
I suppose I should also mention that I am involved with a startup (www.elephantdrive.com) that is competitive with both Streamload (or MediaMax) and Omnidrive, and big believer in / consumer of S3.
Good luck, guys.
I fully agree with previous commenters on that most companies would not be willing to take a chance on production data with Nivanix.
Amazon S3 is not only proven but is scalable as your startups or companies data needs grow.
What Nirvanix should do is focus on a niche market. That way they can quickly build up their reputation and market reach and then at a future point they could sell their technology and customers to a larger firm…say Google or IBM.
I would be curious to see how Nirvanix plans to pull it off. With their mish mash of IDE hard drives and aging hardware I don’t think they’re poised to challenge Amazon.
One way of mitigating a risk of disaster is to have an online backup service. I have been reading about the online backup and storage industry for a while now. It is becoming a commonly accepted technology these days.
For online backup news, information and articles, there is an excellent website:
BackupReview.info
This site lists more than 400 online backup companies and ranks the top 25 on a monthly basis. MediaMax is listed as the top online backup provider for the month of August 2007.
It also features a CEO Spotlight page, where senior management people from the industry are interviewed.
Cheers,
Interesting because Steve Iverson is not mentioning this mixup of interests in his communications and on another post Patrick Harr is blamed for all current problems with mediamax so who is really responsible for the big mess
mediamax is in right now
Actually it starts to make sense now what they (Mediamax) have been doing. The more stupid it is to do 2 things at the same time, which caused (and still does) a lot of problems to their nowadays customers. Which already caused them a big loss of income from all those who canceled their subscriptions.
Painful to see how they used their customers, over and behind their back, with their money.
It’s ashame
Just how is MediaMax the number one site, according to BackupReview.info, for the month of August 2007, let alone Streamload in the top five for June and July of 2007 when there are SO many problems?
A
There is another post in july on this site from this author
and some discussion on cnet, blogger which illustrate this.
Try google with mediamax problem fraud and you get all the entries
As far as these reviews concerned I doubt their review. I am a mediamax paying customer myself and it all true so the review must be based on marketing only
If its associated with MediaMax I’d only put backups on it till it proves worthy.
The MediaMax users blog has managed to learn some interesting facts from the company. Disclosure of the scale of recent problems on the official blog has been sadly lacking.
http://mediamax...s.blogspot.com/
Ask the Nirvanix employees about morale. I would bet a few dollars things are not a picnic over there.
There is a related post on this site which says more about the current mediamax status. I really think this has something todo with each other also based on post I was able to read somewhere by Steve Iverson.
http://www.tech...e-users-revolt/
Here’s also the comment somebody got from the big boss Steve himself
My opinion you can read at the other post.
Yes, that article is true. Unfortunately, I (and MediaMax) am under a strict confidentiality agreement that prevents me from providing any additional details at this time. Michael at Techcrunch did his homework and put together all this information from an unknown source – we did not provide it to him as Nirvanix has wanted to wait until their launch to announce their new company.
No – this is very good news for MediaMax and does not change anything we’ve said. We still currently have the same problems we have detailed and are working to solve them. The rushed datacenter move was a result of this split, but now we are a separate operating entity and can concentrate 100% on MediaMax. Everyone at MediaMax is very pleased about this split (it’s a good thing to now only having to concentrate on 1 thing – build the best consumer file storage and sharing web site) and our customers should see a massive improvement later this year.
-Steve
The company named “Nirvanix” ceo Patrick Harr should not be trusted in anyway or form I am on the receiving end of what they did to “Streamload” with their so called Technology of MediaMax, “Nirvanix” will take your money, they will not give you any answers to questions, and if it’s anything like what they did to Streamload it will not function as advertised. I hope the San Diego Internet Business media take a long hard look at this company before making any comments on it. and I hope also the San Diego Tribune takes a long hard look as well, I may have to write to them and give them some pointers to look for and at.
As for MediaMax, believe it or not, I think will get better now Steve Iverson is back in charge, I have corresponded with him and found him honest, and truthful in replies to questions I’ve asked. The main problem is the Time Frame as users patience has finally run out
I am continuing to be billed $19.99 monthly by Media Max via my AT&T bill even though I “unsubscribed” to a ridiculous “IQ” test on facebook that fraudulantly got me to “click” on something that I would have NEVER done if I had known about the monthly charge! I have “unsubscribed” several times and received a text message on my cell phone stating that I was “unsubscribed! Yet they are still billing me on my phone bill. I want my money back. What do I do?