As anticipated earlier this month, San Diego based Nirvanix has launched and will offer an alternative to Amazon’s S3 storage service, which is growing rapidly.
The company is positioning itself against Amazon by saying it’s easier to integrate than S3 and they offer a service level agreement to guarantee 99/9% uptime (Amazon does not offer an SLA).
Pricing is $0.18/GB/month for storage and $0.18/GB of data transferred. By comparison, Amazon charges $0.15/GB/month for storage, and $0.10/GB of data transferred in and $0.13-$0.18/GB of data transferred out.
The lack of a service level agreement at Amazon has led many startups to use it for backup purposes only, keeping primary storage under their direct control. They may find Nirvanix as an attractive alternative (and this may also give Amazon an incentive to add an SLA soon).
Nirvanix, however, is affiliated with MediaMax, which has recently gone through a hellish transition that left customers offline and furious. The connection between the two companies is going to create some marketing stress for Nirvanix as it rolls out its new service.
The company has raised $12 million in funding.
Your facts are wrong about S3. Amazon charges $0.10/gig upstream (PUT requests) and $0.18/gig down (GET requests) for the first 10 terabytes, $0.16/gig for the next 40 TB and $0.13/gig for over 50 TB
http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=16427261
cbmeeks
hey thanks. They updated their pricing. I updated the post with the correct information.
NP. they are a lot more expensive than S3.
I’ve been using S3 for a year and can say that about the only thing they have that S3 people want is the POST from browser. S3 only allows PUT. Nobody really cares about SLA’s.
cbmeeks
I think it’s great to have a choice, and I for one am VERY interested in SLAs. I would seriously consider Nirvanix.
How long before Google enters this space? Oh yes, it will happen…
Nobody cares about SLAs??? That and no support are everyone’s biggest complaints about Amazon S3.
The Nirvanix service looks great! The integrated video transcoding and thumbnail generation is pretty cool too.
Looks like S3 has a serious competitor in Nirvanix. Great to see - can’t wait to learn more about this company.
The economics of these services are amazing. Small fry (me) can move data at about $0.03 per GB. 70-80% gross margin is a good thing.
And, who cares if Google comes in. Anyone who has dealt with Google’s customer service will not be entrusting their data to them anytime soon.
“Nobody cares about SLAs??? That and no support are everyone’s biggest complaints about Amazon S3.
The Nirvanix service looks great! The integrated video transcoding and thumbnail generation is pretty cool too.”
I can only speak from my experiences. AT&T put on a dog and pony show one time for us trying to get business and they bragged about SLA’s. “We will pay YOU if you ever have downtime!”
Sounds great. However, when we asked “How much will you pay us? Your hourly rate our ours?”
They got quiet.
See, it’s easy to say you have an SLA. But if your business averages $5000 per hour in sales and Nirvanix is down for 5 hours, how much would they pay you??? Or, would they just give you a few gigs for free?
So any of you honestly going to jump over because of three little letters? SLA
SLA? blah…worthless.
cbmeeks
We’ve been using Nirvanix as part of our ElasticDrive offering. If you compare the cost of using Nirvanix Vs S3, Nirvanix’s storage costs are a bit more but the cost saving from S3’s put/list offsets the overall price to the point of making Nirvanix actually about 10-20% cheaper for heavy usage applications such as our Network storage application.
See http://www.Elasticdrive.com
Reuven. You seriously have people paying $2,999 (for unlimited storage) to use your software to connect with these services (e.g. S3)? This doesn’t even include the costs incurred by using the storage services… Why would I use your program and not, say, JungleDisk?
Great Question,
Jungle disk is basically a file transfer application similar to that of an http://FTP., it’s currently limited to Amazon’s S3 service.
ElasticDrive enables actual formating of multiple geographically disperse storage resources to act like a local hard drive. ElasticDrive supports most modern filesystems including EXT3, XFS, JFS, ZFS etc as well as the ability to provide blocklevel snapshots for infinite rollback/versioning. This is handy in a lot of enterprise contexts where a native file system is easier to use then trying to re-architect your app to fit the confines of a web service call.
Also, files can be written to several remote locations simultaneously (S3, Nirvanix and your own storage).
The cool thing about nirvanix, we can target specific geographical regions, so lets say an office in London may have access to the local data center, where an office in China get the Asian data center.
elasticdrive looks seriously good.
s3 and nirvanix look good for several apps we have underway now.
are there case studies - informal or otherwise - even user anecdotes re the hows and wheres people are putting this to use beyond ’simple’ backup and storage? anyone using these for production web apps on any scale?
thanks -
S
smcnally
I know of one: http://www.coutorture.com
They use it to deal with high volume periods (fashion week and the like.)
MS has a better plan, right now I don’t know what it is but it is better.
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
well the original point of not caring about SLAs is correct. no company, particularly a startup, can make an SLA prediction with no history to back it up. at the very least, no company should be even talking uptime until they have been live for a year. wheee - my service has been up for ten minutes….100% uptime!
chances are amazon has higher actual uptimes and response times. only an idiot would take the nirvanix SLA to have any meaning.
An SLA is only as good as the company behind it.
I use S3 in a production level to serve images (about 1.5TB per month) for my site http://www.boardgamegeek.com
One thing I don’t see is the cost for GET requests.
Amazon charges 0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests and it’s not insignificant if you are using them as for distribution (like me).
Scott,
I work for Nirvanix and we don’t charge for PUTS/GETS or other requests. Our pricing is $0.18 per GB/month (based on daily average) and $0.18 per GB bandwidth (up/down). Some of our advantages over S3 are:
- Media clustered file system available for file system calls – move, copy, rename, delete, etc
- Advanced media services – large file support up to 256GB, transcoding, image manipulation, etc
- Parent/child account mgmt
You can sign up for a trial account (no cc required) at: http://www.nirvanix.com/gettingStarted.aspx.
Aj
With luck, this will convince amazon to finally add some oft-requested features to s3.
One feature people have been asking for since S3’s inception: moving/renaming/copying files in S3 without having to download and re-upload.
Remember, Nirvanix = MediaMax. It is a spin-off of the same company, and even has the same president.
Do some research, investigate the HELL MediaMax has put it’s users through for the past year, and then decide if you want to truth them with your data.
Nick, do your homework. Nirvanix IS a completely separate company. Contact them yourself and find out the real story rather than posting false statements. http://www.nirvanix.com/contact.aspx
Hi, Mike.
It has the same president. It has, by some accounts, 50% of the same staff. It was STARTED by MediaMax, for crying out loud.
Steve Iverson even ADMITS these facts. They aren’t in dispute.
Actually, in Steve Iverson’s own words this is not the case. Steve was the former CEO of Streamload. Patrick Harr came in and took over as CEO of Streamload (for a period of 2 months) at which time Mediamax was then spun out of Streamload and Steve Iverson became CEO of Mediamax. Patrick then went on to found Nirvanix - which is a new company with new technology and new service. Mediamax is not nor have they been using the Nirvanix service. The issues with Mediamax are totally and completely separate.
Hi.
Streamload is MediaMax. Steve was president, then they brought in Harr. During this time, they were working behind the scenes to create Nirvanix. Steve during this time was MediaMax’s CTO.
When Nirvanix finally got funding, Harr stepped down to take over the “new” company and Steve became president again.
Sources report that Harr is not the only staff to go from MediaMax to Nirvanix, but I cannot get either side to confirm this. If I were Nirvanix, I wouldn’t want to be associated with MediaMax, either.
As for you saying that the issues with MediaMax are separate, on the official MediaMax blog post HERE, “Team MediaMax” says that:
This is their admission that, yes, our “spin out” of Nirvanix was “partially” to blame for all the hell they’ve put their users through over the past year. They admit this, and they’ve admitted the shared staff, etc.
Again, these statements aren’t in debate - they come directly from official MediaMax and Nirvanix press releases, blogs, and interviews.
I encourage anyone who doesn’t believe me - do a little surfing, read the words directly from their mouths. They certainly refuse to come right out and say what the “affiliation” is between the 2 companies, but their combined statements tell the story. And they DO confess they are “affiliated” - just not saying in what way.
For crying out loud - their offices are less than a block away from each other (600 B St vs 525 B St, San Diego.) Check the facts, people. Do your own research - you’ll find the truth.
There as an interesting article on newsvine
For reasons not clear yet it has been removed. The author mentioned earlier
that he was pressed to open up comments for mediamax to react. They didn’t react so why removal of this article. Do they want to avoid any more publicity, is there more to tell?
Fortunately there are copies to be found on the net
Another interesting article can be found on the san diego tribune online
What is clear at this moment? The problems at mediamax are still not solved. See also mediamaxusers.blogspot for this. I don’t see a reason why they cannot come out with their story. Nirvanix is live so why the incomplete information?
The original articles on newsvine are published elsewhere, http://nirvanix.nfshost.com/