Scott Genereux, CEO of Nirvanix

Transcription

1 The unique value proposition that Nirvanix brings to customers is the ability to completely eliminate capital expenditures by embracing an enterprise class storage-as-a-service model that delivers usage-based pricing and removes all maintenance and technical refresh costs from the storage purchasing equation. Scott Genereux, CEO of Nirvanix

2 1-2-1 I SCOTT GENEREUX Creating confidence in the cloud GURDIP KALLEY Business Development Manager, S3 SNS Europe talks to Scott Genereux, CEO of Nirvanix, about storage-as-aservice and discovers that, while there are many solutions available in the market today, few, if any, offer true enterprise-class cloud storage. S3 s Gurdip Kalley explains how he plans to bring the Nirvanix technology to customers across Europe, keen to exploit the benefits of cloud-based data storage. Q Please can you provide some background on the company to date? A SG Nirvanix is the established leader in enterprise-class cloud storage services. The company began operations approximately 3 years ago and was an early entrant in the cloud storage market. This has enabled us to gain an unrivalled level of expertise and insight into enterprise-class cloud storage requirements, as well as build up a rather compelling list of both established and emerging customers. In other words, while there is a barrage of freshly minted cloud storage vendors just hitting the scene in search of their first paying customers, Nirvanix is focused on market share capture and rapid revenue growth by building on the successes we have experienced at customers such as GE, NBC Universal, Cisco and Logitech. Only Nirvanix can offer customers battle-hardened, proven second generation cloud storage technology and the only complete, end-to-end cloud storage portfolio in the industry spanning consumptionbased public, hybrid and private cloud deployment options. Q Cloud storage is not a new concept. The early storage service providers (SSPs) did not survive, so what s different this time around? A SG There are a number of different factors to consider. Firstly, SSPs were focused on convincing large enterprises to outsource their tier 1 structured data to off- site locations. Enterprises were not, and still are not, interested in outsourcing the storage of their tier 1 structured data. Anyone who comes up with this type of business model will fail. This is the type of data that requires 1 millisecond response time transaction processing data, Oracle Financials, etc. and needs to be kept in-house. In contrast, most Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) are focused on Tier 2 and Tier 3 unstructured data files content such as PowerPoint presentations, computer generated images, JPEGs,.PDF documents and medical and molecular imagery files that, once stored/archived, do not require costly tier one storage systems due to their infrequent access rates. Nirvanix focuses on the ninety percent of enterprise data that is more than three months old and is inactive or never accessed. Secondly, SSPs such as Storage Networks and SANRISE were building their data center infrastructures based almost entirely on Tier 1 EMC and HDS storage systems. The fundamental problem with that model is that they were acquiring the same hardware as their target customers at prices that cost much more than what a CitiBank or Charles Schwab would pay for the equivalent products. In contrast, CSPs add value in the software layer over cost-effective, high-density commodity storage hardware. Asides from the wrong data focus and the unstable economics of the SSP model, the mentality of customers was just not there. In , the IT mindset wasn t ready, bandwidth was anemic and security was weak. All of this has changed in The cloud is now. Q Even more recently, big name cloud providers have suffered high profile outages, so why is Nirvanix confident that it can succeed in the cloud storage space? A SG I would point you to a quote from leading European industry analyst Josh Krischer of Josh Krischer & Associates, A few years ago came the second wave of storage-as-utility with companies such as Amazon S3, Google and Rackspace Hosting. In 2009 and 2010 all these companies suffered from outages which validated users concerns about data and application availability in the cloud. It seems that the early providers did not deploy a robust infrastructure to avoid such MAY

3 SCOTT GENEREUX I incidents. Nirvanix gets it right. Nirvanix learned from the mistakes of the early storage utility and storage cloud providers by providing flexible storage services with high availability and enterprise-level support. Q In other words, what are the USPs that Nirvanix brings to this market? A SG The unique value proposition that Nirvanix brings to customers is the ability to completely eliminate capital expenditures by embracing a enterprise-class storage-as-aservice model that delivers usage-based pricing and removes all maintenance and technical refresh costs from the storage purchasing equation. The cloud economics of Nirvanix completely streamline the storage purchasing experience, enabling customers to effectively pay only for the storage they actually consume not meta data storage and not RAID overhead, which can be in excess of 35% in storage systems running a RAID 6 configuration, for example. Customers want to move beyond the pain and agitation of acquiring and managing physical storage farms for their Tier 2 and Tier 3 storage deployments. We can remove that pain with a model that provides all uploads, downloads, replication and bandwidth in a single monthly bill at a rate that is far more cost-effective than continuing to pay the likes of NetApp or EMC for more usable and unusable physical storage capacity. Nirvanix offers enterprise-class cloud storage services that deliver the highest levels of security, reliability and scalability. Our solutions offer the most logical and seamless progression to a cloud storage environment for customers that are accustomed to receiving enterprise-class service, support and quality-of-service. Bottom line, if you buy cloud storage from Amazon S3, you re stuck dealing with a web form, not what enterprise customers are looking for. And if you buy cloud storage from EMC, well, they don t offer usage-based cloud storage-as-a-service, so your capital expenditures will only increase. Q In terms of end user education, what are the main points they need to consider when looking at the three cloud options: public, private, and hybrid? A SG That s a good question, and one that definitely needs MAY to be addressed. First, I believe it s important to clarify the difference between cloud compute storage and cloud storage, as there are many misconceptions in the marketplace today. Cloud compute storage is storage that is directly attached to a cloud compute environment. I m referring to utility block storage such as 3PAR and EMC s Vmax. These are not web-based, object-based data stores; these are storage systems that make a great compliment to an environment comprised of aggregated compute resources, primarily blade server farms. Cloud storage is the aggregation of multiple storage resources into a single universally accessible pool. It must be deployed as a service, accessed via the Internet or a dedicated network link, offer usage-based pricing and billing and guaranteed quality-ofservice levels. Regardless of the type of cloud customers are considering public, hybrid or private, if the cloud storage solution you are looking to deploy doesn t offer those key capabilities, then you simply aren t buying cloud storage. You re likely making an up-front payment for more storage hardware that was designed for different applications that simply has the term cloud affixed to it for marketing purposes. For example, EMC will gladly sell you Atmos and encourage you to build a private cloud. However, the fundamental problem with EMC s approach is that they are pushing more hardware on the floor and asking for up-front payments. This is not cloud. This is called selling data center infrastructure. This is no different than selling a EMC Vmax. We have one customer that scaled their environment from 40 terabytes to nearly 2 petabytes in 12 months by leveraging our attractive consumption-based pricing model. If they didn t store anything during a particular month, they didn t get a bill it s that simple. EMC and the larger IT vendors are fearful of storage-as-a-service models due to concerns of eroding their longstanding fat margins. But it s the customers who will dictate the shift to storage-as-a-service, not the vendors and the customers are definitely shifting to the usagebased cloud. Q And how does Nirvanix position itself within these three cloud models? A SG Nirvanix is the only vendor to offer a truly federated cloud storage portfolio spanning public, hybrid, private clouds and a CloudNAS Gateway. Every other vendor is waging a war to push their one cloud offering as the ultimate answer whereas we let the customer decide what is optimal for their particular environment. Unlike Amazon, we have solution architects who go on customers sites and work with their IT team to design custom cloud solutions. Specifically, we have the Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network our public cloud storage solution. It is comprised of a cluster of 7 carrier-class data centers that enable you to start with as little as one gigabyte and expand that as and when your business requires. You can continue growing your global namespace and we simply add more storage across our grid to accommodate your growth. Our SDN offers a fully redundant infrastructure

4 1-2-1 I SCOTT GENEREUX with integrated load balancing and a full directory structure with storage pools and child accounts. Pay as you grow, usage-based pricing with a monthly bill is a core part of this service. Next we have Nirvanix hnode Software This is our core software IP, which enables the deployment of both hybrid and public cloud solutions. The software, which has 11 patents pending, provides a virtual file system with a billion plus object store; the ability to provide usage-based billing and pricing; secure multitenancy; support for cloud protocols such as REST and SOAP; a true global namespace as opposed to a silo mentality; proven, automatic data integrity and an open set of APIs for easy customer integration. The industry has often abused the term private cloud, as in the case of EMC, where they merely look to offload data center equipment on your floor and charge you up front, thereby increasing your CapEx. In contrast, Nirvanix can establish a private node of storage capacity in your data center and manage it as a service, effectively charging you usage-based pricing, enabling you to immediately lower your CapEx and only get billed for the storage capacity you actually consume. Once you have a Nirvanix private node of storage capacity in your data center, our cloud storage software enables you to access our SDN Public Cloud as well, so should you require additional capacity beyond the local storage on your site, you can simply access our Public Cloud to accommodate your data growth. This effectively gives you a Hybrid Cloud environment, where you are leveraging the benefits of onsite storage being managed as a service and offsite storage that is being accessed as a service. This is a prime example of how Nirvanix enables Cloud Federation in today s data centers. We also offer Nirvanix CloudNAS Gateways, which enable you to turn any server on the network into a gateway to the clouds. Amazon does not offer a gateway to access its cloud network, for example. Q Security seems to be the number one concern when it comes to the cloud are end users right to be worried, or do they simply need to make a mindset change? A SG Cloud Storage by Nirvanix has very high levels of security. We have found that data is actually safer in the cloud than in some existing corporate data center environments. For example, some corporations experience theft and espionage which can leave critical data exposed. With the Nirvanix cloud and its secure multi-tenancy and rock-solid, bullet-proof encryption, no one but you can see and access your data. In fact, Nirvanix can t even access your data once you encrypt it. That s why we tell customers to always keep their encryption password in a safe place because they are the only ones that can access that data. Our cloud storage solutions are so secure that security auditors from Ernst & Young have validated their security strengths for large corporate customers. We offer SAS 70 Type II compliant operations, physical security, a secure multi-tenant file system and SSL. Moreover, if you run a Google search on information breaches or data loss, you ll find hundreds of articles on the breaches in internal corporate security caused by irate employees and very little articles on such security breaches in the cloud. Q More specifically, does the cloud throw up new security issues? If so, how are these being addressed by Nirvanix and others? A SG For any customer looking to leverage a cloud storage service to streamline their IT operations, security concerns should be paramount. Customers should have professional security auditors perform a comprehensive audit of their potential provider s facilities. They should ensure that all of the latest security mechanisms and protocols are in place and that they match or exceed the ones in their own internal data centers. We provide customers with the ability to not only inspect our data centers, but to select where their data resides and we ensure that we are always one step ahead in supporting the latest security technologies and advanced encryption capabilities. More specifically, Nirvanix focuses on physical data security, organizational security and logical data security. In the area of physical data security, we ensure 24x7 on-site security, biometric hand geometry readers on all doors, kinetic locks on all closed cabinets, CCTV digital camera coverage, bulletresistant walls and perimeter concrete bollards and planters. Q Scalability is another possible area of concern what do end users need to consider when looking at different cloud propositions? A SG Customers need to make sure they aren t investing in a fragile cloud storage environment. They need productiongrade cloud, not cloud with a dose of excuses. Nirvanix s cloud storage software was designed from the ground up to accommodate massive content files. Nirvanix has proven sustained speeds into our cloud storage network at over 7 terabytes per pay, per customer effectively handling large unstructured content files an order of magnitude better than anything else in the market. At Nirvanix, we have built an advanced file virtualization layer that presents petabytes of pooled storage as one large global namespace designed to handle millions of users and billions of files as opposed to competitive offerings which can handle only millions of files. Now, initially you might think millions of files is enough, but when you have an enterprise that wants to free up their existing storage assets and store 200 million JPEGs in the cloud, all of a sudden a billion plus-sized object store becomes much more of a business criticality. Nirvanix offers five nines of availability with a multi-node policy. Q Application and data availability is also an issue again, what do end users need to consider when looking at different cloud propositions? A SG Customers need to look for guaranteed quality-of-service levels. Not best efforts quality-of-service, but guarantees. They also need to run a data-intensive proof of concept with a few vendors to see if their actual, real-world cloud storage performance matches their marketing claims. And on the topic of availability, customers need to make sure they aren t being MAY

5 SCOTT GENEREUX I used as a guinea pig. There are a lot of new entrants in the cloud storage space both large vendors and start ups and everyone is looking for that first major cloud storage win to put under their belt. Potential cloud storage customers should ask for current customer references and interview them to be assured that there are actual paying customers for a given cloud storage product or service. Anyone can throw up a dozen logos and claim they have customers the key is to dig down and understand are these paying customers? Are they POCs? Were they given the gear free-of-charge? The key is to understand how stable a given cloud storage technology foundation is when it s deployed. 24 Q What are the products and services that Nirvanix has brought to market thus far? A SG We ve introduced our public cloud storage network, SDN; our hnode software for deploying hybrid and public clouds, and our CloudNAS Gateway, for rapidly and effectively moving data into and out of the cloud. Q And how have these been received? A SG As noted by leading industry analysts in recent months, Nirvanix has secured a number of significant enterprise customer wins for cloud storage over larger, more established vendors such as EMC Atmos and Amazon S3. This is primarily due to the enterprise-class capabilities and consumption-based pricing we offer customers. Lowering CapEx is a massive priority for customers and we expect continued share capture and revenue growth in Q And are there any new developments planned for 2011? A SG There are a number of new, compelling partnerships on the horizon. Stay tuned. Q What is Nirvanix s presence in Europe right now? And what plans to increase this? A SG Currently Nirvanix has a cloud storage node in Frankfurt, Germany and two in Switzerland in Berne and Zurich via our partner and customer, Swisscom. We expect to expand our presence in Europe by deploying additional nodes in other countries both emerging and established countries. Q How does the Channel fit with Nirvanix s development plan? A SG Nirvanix enables its partners to enter the fast growing cloud storage market with compelling, usage-based solutions that go beyond the barriers of existing cloud storage offerings. According to IDC there will be 27 exabytes of cloud storage capacity in the market by 2012, and the revenue potential of the market will exceed $7B by 2014, all driven by the increasing prevalence of content archive and delivery, a massive shift to file-based storage and a fundamental reset of the bar for scalability and density. Concurrently, enterprises MAY are experiencing explosive growth of data they must store a 10 fold increase in the next 5 years with 95% of it being unstructured. This problem is only being exacerbated by longterm compliance and retention requirements such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration s 21 CFR Part 11 law, which requires clinical trials and approvals to be stored for up to 35 years and the data associated with the manufacture of biological products to be stored for up to 5 years. All of these factors present a confluence of opportunity for the emerging cloud storage technologies offered by Nirvanix, particularly when combined with the broad market reach and sales expertise of channel partners worldwide. Q In terms of geography and/or industry sectors within Europe, what are the Nirvanix sweetspots and where do you see the potential for growth? A SG In Europe, perhaps even more so than in other regions, the ability to specifically say where your data resides and where it is stored is a criticality. Nirvanix gives its customers in Europe the ability to select which of our three data centers they want their data to reside and we enable them also to provision their own data from our intuitive management console. Some cloud storage providers will just tell you that your data is in the cloud without providing a specific location. So the enterpriseclass data location, provisioning and security inspection capabilities make our cloud storage service ideally suited for use across Europe, particular in those countries that comprise the European Union, where stricter regulations apply and enterprise-class cloud storage capabilities are more critical. Q Could you share a couple of recent customer success stories? A SG Sure, a $40B networking innovator recently deployed its tech support data customer support files, if you will onto our cloud network. This enables the customer to free up internal storage resources and leverage the cloud to lower overall IT costs. It also enables the customer to adopt a follow the sun methodology for its tech support function, whereby when one region is finished working on a given set of customer support files, they can save them to the cloud and the next region that begins its workday can download the files from the cloud and

6 1-2-1 I GURDIP KALLEY immediately begin working on them. This has enabled this networking innovator to increase productivity on a global scale. Another example is a customer of ours in the advertising industry that is leveraging our cloud for distributed content and collaboration. They can basically upload an advertisement or segments of a video and their customers can download the video and provide feedback the same day. This can happen 3-4 times in a single day, really shortening the process of creating a finalized, approved ad. They no longer have to physically mail a Blu-Ray disc or DVD to a client and then wait a week or so for their feedback. The enterprise storage cloud is becoming a powerful tool to accelerate productivity. You don t use the cloud to render these images you would use HPC storage systems for that but you would use the cloud to share the images to bring them to completion much faster. It s a powerful capability that we believe will become a big driver for cloud storage adoption. Q Cloud seems to be one of those IT seismic shift moments is this right, or will we all be wondering what was all the fuss about in a couple of years time?! A SG As opposed to other IT trends or marketing themes, cloud has emerged as a reality. Customers large, established corporations are deploying cloud storage solutions now, and are looking to increase their use of the cloud on a go-forward basis. Sure, you have many vendors out there abusing the term cloud by affixing it to their existing storage systems that were designed for different applications, but when you speak with customers, cloud economics are simply too compelling to ignore. You will see increasingly larger cloud storage deployments in the future. The customers that have 1-2 petabytes stored in the cloud today will be storing petabytes within months. Q What is the relationship between S3 and Nirvanix? A GK The relationship between S3 and Nirvanix is still in its infancy. S3 has identified Nirvanix as a credible alternative to the likes of Amazon and Google for cloud based enterprise data storage solutions. S3 has had experience of working with Nirvanix s management team in the past both with Scott Genereux at HDS and Erik Hardy at Xsigo. S3 has confidence in Nirvanix s senior management as well as those venture capital funds backing the technology. S3 now looks forward to working closely with Nirvanix across Europe addressing the needs of cloud based data storage amongst its customer base. Q How did this come about, and how do you see it developing? A GK S3 is one of the UK s leading independent data storage and management solutions provider. We have been trading for over 20 years, have over 300 customers and support over 100 petabytes of data storage infrastructure. S3 stays ahead of its competitors by continuing to work with industry leading vendors such as; EMC, NetApp and Symantec, but also identifying new, innovative and break-through technologies. Q What is it about the technology that S3 likes and how does it complement S3 s portfolio? A GK S3 designs, delivers and supports data storage solutions for organisations whose requirements vary from terabytes to petabytes. Our biggest customers today easily manage data volumes in excess of several petabytes and see this growing to hundreds of petabytes in the next few years. The question is how does S3 continue to stay ahead of the curve by meeting the needs of this ever growing and insatiable demand for data storage? Our customers have begun to explore the use of cloud based data storage for Tier 2 and 3 data. In some cases the cloud is being used as a replication target to overcome the challenges of backing up big data. The reality is that Nirvanix provides S3 with a core cloud based data storage solution upon which we can add the value of our partner base including CommVault, Symantec, Nasuni and id7. The Nirvanix SDN is a deliverable solution that works today with a referenceable customer base. Whilst our competition is deciding how to build, fund and support cloud based infrastructure, Nirvanix has let S3 hit the ground running! This model gives S3 the opportunity to continue building best of breed and innovative cloud solutions utilising all of our leading partners and technologies. Q What guidance would you offer to end users looking at cloud storage right now? A GK My main advice would be to look for solutions that deliver usage-based pricing, a billion plus-sized object store, secure multi-tenancy, the ability to support cloud protocols such as SOAP and REST, a true global namespace and an open set of APIs for easy customer integration. Most importantly, look for cloud storage that is deployed as a service, that eliminates all of your upfront CapEx costs and eliminates all of your maintenance and technical refresh costs. Look for cloud storage solutions that actually save you money, not deliver more of the same with a cloud label, or, even worse, increase your costs. Q Any other comments? A GK I would close with the fact that we are just at the beginning of what will be a massive, ongoing customer shift to storage-as-a-service. The larger IT vendors do not have an answer to this yet, and with the increasing traction of companies such as Nirvanix and Amazon S3, the storage leaders five years from now may very well be different than the household names people are familiar with today. MAY