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Nirvanix Provides Cautionary Tale For Cloud Storage

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Nirvanix, a early and well funded cloud storage pioneer, has closed its doors and left over 1,000 customers with only two weeks to save their data that was hosted on the cloud storage provider.   Thus Nirvanix joins a short list of Internet storage companies that have closed down in the past, leaving customers with a limited time to recover and save their data.

In most of these earlier on-line storage company failures customers had a very brief time to react to the closure and in some cases it wasn’t obvious before the closure that there were problems.  While they are important, service level agreements (SLAs) are only useful for companies that are still in business.  A further issue is whether data left on Nirvanix storage will be sanitized.

In addition to outside failure of Internet storage companies all on-line storage providers have experienced some periods of downtime when users couldn’t access their data and use the storage services.  There are several things that users can do to minimize their exposure to web storage failures or even temporary outages.

For large data stores, moving data en masse to or from a cloud provider is best done with physical media (such as digital tape or external hard disk drives) than with electronic file transfers.   There are many services for physical movement of content, including shuttle services such as those offered by large web providers like Amazon.

On-line storage customers should consider having their data stored simultaneously at two different sites within the same cloud storage company or ideally between two different storage providers.    They may also inquire whether there are services available at the storage providers data site that allow faster data transfers to other local cloud storage services within a single data center or between data centers located close enough to each other to enable faster LAN or MAN data transfers.

Protection of data left in a cloud data center is probably best done using encryption where the customer controls the encryption keys.  Even better if the customer can know for sure the data is erased but at least encryption provides a pretty effect barrier to data access.

It is never fun to have to migrate a lot of data and associated services from one storage provider to another over a short period of time.  Nevertheless by learning from the history of on-line storage failures and outages a customer can prepare for these eventualities.

Cloud storage has its risks and having your data in someone’s facility is the biggest source of this risk.  Making sure that your provider is financially sound for the long run is a challenge and your best bet is probably not to put all your eggs in one basket.