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Nirvanix offers cloud taster to nervous customers

Hybrid private/public cloud with outsourcing

Nirvanix will set up a cloud file storage node in your own data centre, federate it to other nodes and provide an on-ramp to its public cloud storage.

The idea is to effectively out-source storage of your large file-based data sets to Nirvanix. It installs and manages a so-called hNode, with "h" meaning hybrid, in your own data centre as your own private cloud, and delivers its services to you in a cloud economics way, meaning pay-for-use.

Nirvanix's marketing director, Adrian Herrera, said: "There is a setup fee and a monthly per GB fee based on the amount of storage. Nirvanix scales the solution as usage grows."

Customers can federate multiple hNodes in several geographically dispersed data centres together, with a global namespace and policy-based replication between them. Policies can also be set up to transfer data to Nirvanix's own cloud, the Storage Delivery Network.

File data in the system can be accessed by CIFS or NFS, the SOAP and REST APIs, and through third-party software from CommVault, Atempo, Arkeia, Gladient, Nasuni, Ocarina Networks, Tarmin, Vembu and others. The minimum configuration is 200TB and this can expand beyond 2PB. It contains all the networking hardware, software and storage needed in multiple racks. The starting network link is 1Gbit/E and this can be scaled up to 10GbitE. Nirvanix says the overall system can support millions of users and billions of files.

It also says this product and service enable customers to store sensitive data that must be retained on-premise in a cloud-like way, and provides the scalability and enhanced data protection of a connected public cloud as well, with users simply seeing a single file storage pool from wherever they happen to be located.

Think of this private cloud hybrid as halfway between running your own large-scale secondary storage for unstructured data and shipping it all off to a public cloud. Use it to build your confidence and then move entirely to a public cloud - if economics, network access speed and service level agreements mean it is practical. ®

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