Nirvanix's CMO interviewed; Internet Storage in the clouds discussed

I spoke to John sometime back and we had an interesting chat on what Nirvanix is up to. John spoke with all the passion there was to find about what Nirvanix was up to. Anyways here's John's profile from Nirvanix's site.

Jonathan Buckley | Chief Marketing Officer

Jonathan Buckley comes to Nirvanix from PowerFile, an innovator in active archiving appliances for permanent storage of digital content and assets, where he served as the company’s Vice President of Marketing. Prior to PowerFile, Buckley served as the Vice President of Marketing for the software, internetworking and blade switch businesses lines at McDATA Corporation. Buckley’s efforts resulted in a turnaround and 50 percent year-over-year growth of those business lines. Prior to McDATA, he was a founding team member and Vice President of Marketing and Business Development for NetBrowser Communications, an enterprise software company that delivered a unified management solution for mission-critical infrastructure of Fortune 500 companies worldwide. Previously, he served as manager of the business strategy group at Arthur Andersen, LLP. Buckley earned a Bachelor’s degree in economics from The George Washington University in Washington D.C.

and here is our summarized tete-e-tete:

1. Jonathan, tell us a bit about your role in Nirvanix?

I am the team leader for Nirvanix. By title, I am the Chief Marketing Officer. This role involves responsibility for all traditional inbound and outbound marketing disciplines including Product Management, Product Marketing, MarComm/PR/corporate marketing, investor relations, company spokesperson, heavy participation in overall corporate strategy together with senior team.

2. What does Nirvanix offer?

Nirvanix provides Internet-based storage optimized for media and works strictly "B2B", enabling businesses to come to market with their storage-intensive solutions. With its global cluster of storage nodes and patent-pending technologies collectively referred to as “The Storage Delivery Network” (SDN), Nirvanix allows any Internet-enabled application to scale instantly to meet the demands for hosting and delivering millions of media files such as consumer video, audio, photographs and documents. The Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network dramatically shortens time-to-market, reduces costs, and provides flexibility and control for businesses integrating Internet-scale online storage to their applications. Companies no longer need to stand up data center facilities around the world in order to preserve user upload/download experiences. The Nirvanix SDN is not only clustered into one, large, global grid, but the Nirvanix Internet Media File System (IMFS) intelligently directs uploads to the nearest available storage node for speed and then balances the files location(s) worldwide depending on download demands. In this way, this online storage service works with attribute of a "Content Delivery Network" though it is NOT intended to displace a one to million broadcast network like an Akamai.

Additionally, has built in a media services layer which does the transcoding of many types of media upon ingestion which saves developers considerable time and effort in bringing user generated content apps to market.

Nirvanix provides developers with an API and/or virtual NAS mounts and/or FTP mounts to which to code their applications. Businesses are charged on a monthly basis as a function of GB used and transported in addition to any services such as media transcoding transactions processed.

3. What is SDN?

This stands for "Storage Delivery Network" and is a term coined by Nirvanix as the company has a unique approach to the online storage market. The term comes from the combination of "online storage" and "content delivery network". While Nirvanix is not designed to replace a broadcast CDN, it does have some of its attributes. Rather than a collection of independent storage centers around the globe, Nirvanix has developed the Internet Media File System which creates a super global namespace internetworking all Nirvanix storage around the planet. This allows Nirvanix to intelligently move files around in the background according to demand in order to optimize user download experience regardless of their location. Likewise, upon upload, the SDN selected the storage node closest to the user in order to speed the process for the user.

• I am beginning to see start-ups focusing on Application and Service Delivery models that are "Anywhere, Anytime, Pay-as-you-go", are they coming to you too?

The businesses that code their applications to the SDN do pay as they go. They pay based on storage, bandwidth and services used monthly. How they charge their end customers ranges wildly.

• So with your plans you may very well challenge the likes of EC2/S3 from Amazon and Google, how does that feel?

Tarry, it is a potentially enormous market with room for many players. Like any intense race, it would not be worth running if the competition was slow. The quality of potential competition in the space validates that we are onto something huge and makes us better players as a result.

• I see your pricing model is already ala-Amazon, is it the right way to go for the industry? What are your customer experiences, are they saving anything at all?

At first blush, our pricing model is above that of Amazon intentionally and will soon morph entirely from the Amazon "bit-bucket" bucket model as our offering is very different from S3. In short, Nirvanix SDN is turn-key and S3 is bare bones by design.

Three out of four customers that switch from S3 thus far have reported net SAVINGS. The reason for this is that the SDN acts as a true file system allow for renaming, moves etc. S3 does not. As a result, such work arounds on S3 generates bandwidth charges. Additionally, on S3 incorporating functionality such as transcoding requires the incorporation of third party applications which drives costs.

• I get a feeling that you (and other) guys are hijacking Cisco's Fabric dream in the Clouds, do you agree?

No, we don't agree. Cisco doesn't have a monopoly on ideas, just a very big marketing budget and an awesome frontman! We have been accused of "hijacking" all kinds of dreams before us, most notable was actually the Larry Ellision's 1995 Network Computing prediction where the PC would slim down to the thin clients as services and storage moved to the cloud. Truthfully, such a suggestion was and is simply logical, it was its predicted timely that was shocking. It didn't happen. What is happening now? Our handhelds are common clients to the web. Personally, I think trend leader Apple has signaled "the time is now" for the consumer with the Mac Air. Storage is moving to the cloud because the pipes are big enough, cheap enough and ubiquitous enough.

• Tell us about your partner eco-system?

Nirvanix has made it very easy to open an account, download the API and tools and begin developing within minutes. You can review the forums on developer.nirvanix.com

As the community has grown since launch in October we are seeing a quick climb in the number of and diversity of applications our partners are building.

• There are always things in the pipeline for start-ups as yours, what can we expect from Nirvanix in the coming months?

There will be both consumer and business focused applications coming to market by some surprisingly large corporations. The SDN is now well scale tested and hardened and some of the larger companies are starting to come into the fray. In terms Nirvanix product pipeline, you will continue to see the rapid buildout of our global Storage Delivery Network, additional flexible ways to get data onto the SDN including virtual NAS mounts and an FTP client. You should expect to see some market-changing partnerships between Nirvanix and both a Content Delivery Network and several managed service providers.