Comments on: Intel Takes Stake In Amazon S3 Competitor Nirvanix

By: Dave Nielsen

Dave Nielsen — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 21:06:16 +0000

This is an enormous space. No provider can meet the needs of the entire online file hosting market. Amazon S3 is going after the general category of backup and storage, but has left a lot of room for Nirvanix to offer media-specific file storage and services like image resizing & rotating, audio & video transcoding and frame extraction. See http://www.nirvanix.com/comparison.aspx for Nirvanix’s comparison.

Full disclosure: I worked as a consultant for Nirvanix in 2007

By: David Mackey

David Mackey — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 05:29:38 +0000

Nirvanix has additional advantages besides their SLA. They also offer the ability to host files unlimited in size, while S3 currently places the limit at 5 GB.

By: S3apps

S3apps — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 04:48:07 +0000

Also -

Intel Invests In Online Backup’s ElephantDrive

Could S3 be an end-user product?

By: Vince

Vince — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 00:21:40 +0000

Allow me to be upfront: I am firmly of the opinion that Google/Amazon/MSFT/etc.. will dominate this space due to the economies of scale, and that this investment by Intel is laughable.

Having said that, let me see if I can get this straight…

1. An online storage company called Streamload is started.

2. It doesn’t work so well. The business model is a little weird (based on usage), and it is constantly criticized for being slow and unavailable. Basically, the technology doesn’t scale. They decide to build new technology. The migration doesn’t work well and users kind of lose it.

3. Amazon launches a very successful storage service. They offer pricing that is only possible because of their vast scale. It is not perfect (see S3apps above) but quickly develops an big developer community and works pretty well.

4. The same people that started Streamload start a new company called Nirvanix. They weren’t able to get the tech right the first time, but now they can be in a razor-thin margin business and compete directly with one of the biggest web companies on the planet, who has a big headstart and more resources. Their secret: they will differentiate themselves with a toothless SLA. This powerful logic compels venture firms to invest $12 million.

5. Strangely, even though he was the CEO of Streamload this fact is omitted from the bio of Nirvanix’s CEO. Curious…

6. Amazon decides to issue an SLA. It also is toothless. But it has Amazon’s reputation attached to it. Hmm…

7. Intel invests an undisclosed amount in Nirvanix.

I just want to make sure I’ve got the facts straight.

Here are my questions:

1) Did Nirvanix already spend the $12 million they raised?
2) When will Google ever offer this type of service?
3) When can I pitch Intel (I’ve got an idea to sell “books” on the “web”)?

By: StartupNewz.com

StartupNewz.com — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 18:58:50 +0000

Intel Invests in Nirvanix…

As per Techcrunch, Intel has invested in Amaxon S3 competitor called Nirvanix. Nirvanix provides 99.9% uptime guarantee and is looking forward to build the storage nodes worldwide to meet the growing demand of online storage….

By: AhmedF

AhmedF — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 07:06:48 +0000

Maybe they can add SSD-drives for those that want ultra high-performance.

By: S3apps

S3apps — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 04:39:15 +0000

>The would immediately differentiate themselves from S3
This would immediately differentiate themselves from S3

By: S3apps

S3apps — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 04:31:50 +0000

In our experience of implementing an s3box (2008) end-user facing service,
one major inconvenience has been the lack of a handy rename file cmd.

While nirvanix is perhaps large-business centric and if our understanding
is correct only provides metered usage, it would perhaps make nirvanix a
strong competitor to s3 (and the later msft and goog’s enterprise storage
offerings) if they could provide some attractive low-cost flat-rate packages
of T-grade (terabytes.. these days 1 drive is 1 TB as we know) offerings,
bw rate-limited (unmetered) by say 100Mb/s or even just 10Mb/s ports.

The would immediately differentiate themselves from S3 while remain a
strong player in the market.

By: Ballmer

Ballmer — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 04:15:35 +0000

Smart move intell, I was just about to leap on this one!
fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com

By: Nick

Nick — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 03:31:42 +0000

Intel capital is huge, Nirvanix must be doing something right. Nice win for Nirvanix

By: abc

abc — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 02:39:12 +0000

By: Duncan Riley

Duncan Riley — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 01:35:37 +0000

my bad, it use to be one of their selling points…now it’s not I guess (amended post)

By: Cedric

Cedric — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 01:26:43 +0000

oops.. bad grammar and beaten to the punch by 37signals (regarding comment #4)

By: Cedric

Cedric — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 01:23:51 +0000

I thought that Amazon S3 has a SLA since October 1, 2007.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/brows.....=379654011

By: Jason Fried

Jason Fried — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 01:21:44 +0000

For the record, Amazon does offer a 99.9% uptime SLA for S3: http://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=379654011

By: Thilo

Thilo — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 01:15:46 +0000

Didn’t you just report about Dell buying another Hosting company? There is some competition in hosting going on.

By: Alex

Alex — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 01:07:32 +0000

love this space…

though a SLA means absolutely nothing. An SLA is just a marketing ploy that allows someone to get out of a contract.

Example, If Rackspace offered 100% uptime and you were one of the unlucky customers affected by the truck driver who hit their data center a few weeks ago the SLA means zero….you were still down!