Nirvanix Closes $25M Funding With Plans To Expand Cloud Storage Reach

Cloud storage service provider Nirvanix on Thursday said it has raised over $25 million in a new round of funding it plans to use to expand a new cloud research facility and double the number of data centers in which its storage cloud resides.

The new funding, which includes a mix of investments from venture capital firms and from strategic investor Intel, brings the total investment in Nirvanix to $70 million.

Nirvanix provides enterprise-class public, private, and hybrid cloud storage as a service. The company owns its own public cloud infrastructure based in nine data centers, or nodes, around the world. It also uses its technology to help customers build private clouds using either the customer's own storage infrastructure or a segmented, non-shared part of the Nirvanix public cloud.

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Part of the new funding is targeted at the expansion of Nirvanix's cloud competency center, where an initial dozen engineers are already busy, said Steve Zivanic, vice president of marketing for the San Diego-based cloud storage company.

Those engineers and several who have yet to be hired are slated to tackle some of the biggest challenges in the storage cloud business, Zivanic said.

For instance, he said, no other provider of cloud storage regularly announced multi-petabyte wins, whereas Nirvanix customer wins include 8.5 PBs of cloud storage for the University of Southern California (USC) Digital Repository, 3 PBs of cloud storage for NBC Universal, and a multi-petabyte global private cloud built by IBM Global Services using the Nirvanix technology.

"We want to solve issues related to managing such large cloud storage repositories," he said. "There are questions about how to ingest 500 TBs from a public cloud quickly into a primary data center after a disaster. Or how to get large sets of data quickly into the cloud. That's what we are developing solutions for."

Nirvanix's technology is centered on the ability to offer customers a single namespace that spreads across the company's cloud storage nodes, each of which is located in a separate data center.

"All these nodes share a namespace," Zivanic said. "With companies like Amazon, each node is its own namespace. So customers need to do multiple uploads of data to get on multiple nodes and make that data available to geographically-separated customers. With Nirvanix, there's a single namespace. Data can be accessed from wherever the user is. A company can upload a file, which can then be easily downloaded from wherever."

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Nirvanix currently has nine nodes located in Texas, California, New Jersey, Hawaii, Switzerland, and Germany. Part of the new funding will help expand its reach into such areas as Singapore, the U.K, Russia, Brazil, and Las Vegas, Zivanic said.

The company also plans to add to its sales and marketing team, he said.

The new $25 million funding is expected to be enough to help Nirvanix reach profitability as it looks to go public within the next 24 months, he said.