03 Nov 2008

Nov. 2, 2008 08:30 AM

Nirvanix CEO shows where the Nirvanix SDN fits into the Cloud Storage space

The term “Cloud Storage” has become en vogue in the past 18 months, pushing the hype curve into the red. While industry buzz and news around this technology has increased, definitions have failed to root any sensibility and meaning as to what it really is and what can differentiate services that proclaim to provide it.

The purpose of this blog post is to show where the Nirvanix SDN fits into the Cloud Storage space and how our proprietary technology makes us the best choice for the enterprise looking for an alternative to building and owning a local or global storage infrastructure to support such data-intensive operations as online archive, remote backup or media library management.

A Cloud Is White, But So Is A Whiteboard

The terms “Cloud Storage” or “Cloud Computing” come from us whiteboard aficionados of the 1990s who loved scribbling a crude fluffy cloud to represent the wide area network, which in most cases now means the public Internet. To that “cloud” we would draw a line to a box representing a server connecting to the WAN or the Internet.

Today, most often, storage and computing industry professionals refer to offering these storage and compute resources over links through the Internet using web-services protocols, thus the common terms, Cloud Storage and Cloud Computing.

Cloud Storage Is Not Online Storage

At Nirvanix, we draw the clear distinction between Cloud Storage and online storage. Cloud Storage is a platform behind an Application Programming Interface (API) upon which one may build a limitless number of applications that harness the platform as its storage repository. Both Nirvanix’s Storage Delivery Network and Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) are examples of Cloud Storage.

Online storage is a fully …

Please click here to continue reading this article