Nirvanix

» see nirvanix.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Nirvanix came out of Streamload, the San Diego file-sending service Steve Iverson started as a student in 1998. By 2007 that company had split in two. The consumer brand went one way as MediaMax and did not survive what came next, and on 1 July 2007 the enterprise half took the name Nirvanix and the better half of the funding.

The pitch was cloud object storage for companies too large to use anything aimed at a person. It arrived at roughly the same moment as Amazon's S3 and it was credible competition for a while. Mission Ventures put in $12 million that September and Intel Capital added $5 million in December. Khosla Ventures led a round in May 2012 that brought the total to around $70 million.

More convincing than the money was the company it kept. IBM signed a five-year OEM agreement, which meant IBM salespeople selling IBM cloud storage that was Nirvanix underneath. Cerner, the hospital records company, ran a petabyte-scale deployment. So did the University of Southern California. These are the customers you point at when a procurement committee asks whether a startup can be trusted with the only copy of something.

Then in June 2013 IBM bought SoftLayer. Nirvanix's largest channel partner now owned its own infrastructure and had no reason to keep reselling somebody else's. The next funding round did not close. There was no pivot available, because the product was warehouses full of disks that had to be paid for every month whether or not anyone bought more capacity.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the letter ~

On 16 September 2013 Nirvanix wrote to its customers. The service would close on 30 September and they should make arrangements. Fourteen days. The website was deactivated on 28 September, the Chapter 11 filing went in on 1 October and was approved on the 8th, and in the middle of that the deadline was pushed out to 15 October with IBM supplying people to help customers haul their own data off the platform. The extension was real and it mattered, but it was negotiated in public during a bankruptcy, which is not a thing anybody wants to be relying on.

~ what a petabyte weighs ~

I have never been a customer of anything like this. Enterprise object storage sold through an IBM contract is as far from a dial-up account in Ankara as a product can get, and by 2013 I was doing computer vision work, where the data stays on machines you can walk up to. The arithmetic travels anyway, and any engineer reads it off the page without being walked through it.

A petabyte is 10^15 bytes. Fourteen days is 1,209,600 seconds. Moving the one through the other requires about 827 megabytes every second, continuously, for two weeks without a stall, which is roughly 6.6 gigabits per second of sustained egress. That is not a setting you change. It is a procurement cycle, a new circuit, and a conversation with a carrier, and Nirvanix had given its customers less time than a carrier needs to provision the circuit. Cerner was fine because Cerner was large enough to be handled personally. The companies that were not that large spent two weeks discovering what their actual recovery position was.

~ the afterlife ~

Oracle picked up selected intellectual property and some of the engineers on 4 December 2013, which is the usual quiet ending: the patents and the people find homes, the service does not. Nothing of Nirvanix ran again under any name.

The thing it left behind was a question. Before September 2013 the standard cloud storage due-diligence list covered uptime, durability figures and where the data physically sat. Afterward it included a line about what happens to the bytes if the vendor files, and contracts started carrying escrow and exit clauses with notice periods measured against how long an actual transfer takes. Nirvanix is cited in that argument more often than most of the companies that outlived it.

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