Nirvanix beckons concerned cloud customers

Cloud service provider Nirvanix is taking advantage of the recent trend toward outages in the cloud by launching a new product aimed at helping enterprises move their cloud-based business quickly to another provider.

Citing the recent well-publicized outage of Amazon Web Services, Nirvanix introduced a technology it calls Cloud Sideloader that it says can migrate enterprises’ files from those providers directly onto Nirvanix’s cluster of storage data centers.

The company is touting the platform as a way for enterprise customers to be able to eliminate a step—to be able to move their storage files directly rather than download them to a temporary location and then upload them with a new provider. Nirvanix says its Cloud Sideloader can “directly ingest” data from other cloud providers’ data centers because its API can consume URLs directly onto its storage network.

This is not the first time Nirvanix has acted opportunistically in the face of a shutdown: In early April, when Iron Mountain Digital shuttered its storage service, Nirvanix offered all “stranded” customers free data migration services onto its cloud storage network and unlimited storage for 30 days.

Despite the fact that the company appears to be capitalizing somewhat on the foibles of other providers, it’s hard not to credit Nirvanix for creative marketing—and for some pretty solid offers for getting potential new customers’ attention. And regardless of what they decide to do and with which cloud storage provider they choose to do it with, enterprises would be smart to consider their backup plans for just such a situation. If nothing else, it serves as a reminder that IT pros should consult with their incumbent storage providers about the process and provisions for migration in the event of a lapse or shutdown.