2012 Prediction: Nirvanix

Digital Universe Grows to Exabytes

Data continues to grow at an astonishing rate. IDC predicts that the digital universe will reach 8,000 exabytes by 2015, growing at 50 percent a year. Yet most companies are still dealing with this data deluge much the same way as when IBM invented RAMAC—putting it on spinning disk and tape. Purchase, install, configure, allocate, pay maintenance fees, migrate to new technology every three years, migrate at product end of life, archive to tape…repeat. For enterprises, this constant pay/migrate churn has zero business value. How long will enterprises put up with this and how long will traditional storage box vendors continue to peddle their wares? We don’t believe very long as cloud storage adoption accelerates and disappears into the core business fabric.

Traditional Storage Box Vendors Face Slow Extinction

With the marketplace success of Nirvanix enterprise-class cloud storage services, the disruptive power of the cloud will move into high gear in 2012, accelerating the pending demise of traditional storage box vendors. EMC, NetApp and Oracle are all busy cloudwashing their products and offering “cloud-in-the-box” (now there’s an oxymoron) configurations. However, this is only a stopgap measure. In the short term they will start losing revenue and margins as they attempt to counter the consumption-based pricing model of cloud storage. In the long term, they will be a shadow of their former selves surviving on sales of tier one storage. IBM saw the changes in the storage landscape and the increasing customer demand for storage-as-a-service and recently signed a five-year OEM agreement with Nirvanix to resell enterprise-class cloud storage as part of its SmartCloud Services.

Cloud Storage Disappears into the Core Business Fabric

Cloud storage is already becoming a feature of many consumer products. iCloud from Apple integrated with phones and tablets and HP including Box with PCs are just the latest in this trend. Users don’t need to know about clouds or storage. It’s just there. Next will be enterprise-level cloud storage. It will just be there as a transparent part of our customer’s IT infrastructure and business processes through tight API integration. Nirvanix is integrated with the most popular backup and archiving software products—Symantec NetBackup and CommVault Simpana—giving enterprises one click to the cloud. Just as consumers are enjoying the benefits of the invisible cloud, enterprises will have their own fully managed cloud storage service that is automated and transparent to users and applications becoming an invisible and integral part of the core business fabric around the world.

We look forward to 2012 and beyond and to seeing our predictions become reality.