San Diego’s Nirvanix is headed to a new state of being, but it’s not transcendent. The 15-year-old cloud storage services provider is winding down its business, according to a notice posted on the company’s website over the weekend.
Nirvanix had positioned itself as an alternative to Amazon Web Services, the big gorilla in cloud storage services. But the company has been telling its customers of its plans to shut down at least since mid-September, according to a number of media reports.
Nevertheless, the unexpected shutdown left many customers scrambling to move petabytes of data to another cloud storage provider. In its online notice to customers, Nirvanix says it is “working hard to have resources available through October 15 to assist you with the transition process,” including phone numbers for the company’s “rapid response team.”
“We are dedicating the resources we can to assisting our customers in either returning their data or transitioning their data to alternative providers who provide similar services including IBM SoftLayer, Amazon S3, Google Storage or Microsoft Azure,” the Nirvanix notice says.
The company, founded in 1998 as Streamload, raised a total of $70 million from venture capital investors, including more than $25 million in a Series C round led by Khosla Ventures in the spring of 2012. Existing investors Valhalla Partners, Intel Capital, and two San Diego firms, Mission Ventures and Windward Ventures, joined in the round.
In announcing last year’s funding round, Nirvanix said it had thousands of customers, including Cerner, IBM, National Geographic, Relativity Media, and the USC Digital Repository.