Intel Capital has taken a stake in San Diego based online storage provider and Amazon S3 competitor Nirvanix.
Nirvanix’s selling points are a claim that its service is easier to integrate than S3 and they offer a service level agreement that guarantees 99.9% uptime (see our previous coverage here.)
Nirvanix said the investment will be used to provide the company with “additional opportunities to further technology advancements of its Storage Delivery Network optimized for media applications”, and “to further accelerate its global build-out of storage nodes to meet swelling demand for its online storage service.”
The size of Intel’s investment was not available, although we did ask and were told that they were not willing to share it. Nirvanix closed a $12 million round earlier in the year that included Mission Ventures, Valhalla Partners and Windward Ventures.
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!
Didn’t you just report about Dell buying another Hosting company? There is some competition in hosting going on.
For the record, Amazon does offer a 99.9% uptime SLA for S3: http://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=379654011
I thought that Amazon S3 has a SLA since October 1, 2007.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/brows.....=379654011
oops.. bad grammar and beaten to the punch by 37signals (regarding comment #4)
my bad, it use to be one of their selling points…now it’s not I guess (amended post)
hi
Intel capital is huge, Nirvanix must be doing something right. Nice win for Nirvanix
Smart move intell, I was just about to leap on this one!
fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
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.
>The would immediately differentiate themselves from S3
This would immediately differentiate themselves from S3
Maybe they can add SSD-drives for those that want ultra high-performance.
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”)?
Also -
Intel Invests In Online Backup’s ElephantDrive
Could S3 be an end-user product?
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.
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