San Diego’s cloud storage provider Nirvanix has raised eyebrows by claiming to be 200 percent faster than the great storage pioneer, Amazon’s Simple Storage Service. Cloud storage is a current hot topic many find hard to understand, but it all comes down to this: Nirvanix and similar companies store your computer’s archives on the Internet. And there is an inconceivable amount of stuff getting archived. Exactly where it gets stored has sometimes been a bit nebulous, which may be part of the reason why it’s known as storage in the cloud.
Nirvanix has five distributed nodes—in Japan, Germany, New Jersey, Texas, and in Southern California—which can archive 20 petabytes (PB) of data. (Unlike Google’s own enormous data centers, Nirvanix leases its space from companies that operate data centers.) A byte is the basic unit of measuring data in computers. One petabyte is approximately one quadrillion bytes, or a one followed by fifteen zeros. If a two-hour-movie is about five gigabytes, that means one petabyte would be enough data storage for 200,000 movies. Facebook’s 10 billion photos are said to be 1 PB. And it has been said that Google processes about 20 PB of data each day.
What comes after petabytes? “Oh, that I don’t know!” laughs Nirvanix CEO Jim Zierick. “The beauty is that it is infinitely scalable. There’s no reason why we can’t have hundreds of nodes around the world.”
Almost everyone has a storage problem, and the amount of computer data is growing explosively. At the same time, hardware and bandwidth gets cheaper. As a result, companies and many individuals are finding it necessary—and less expensive—to shift their data storage to the cloud. Nirvanix has an advertising campaign that says “The Box” (storage server) is dead and “enterprises must abandon archaic devices and embrace the new storage paradigm.”
The new storage paradigm, of course, means the cloud, and the name Nirvanix alludes to the heavenly state of highest spiritual attainment. The company’s slogan is, “We manage your storage, so you can manage your business.” In the world of scalable computer storage such peace of mind comes at an average price of $20,000 and a 24- to 36-month contract.
The company was founded