UPDATED 08:33 EDT / APRIL 11 2011

Nirvanix Takes the Cloud to Hollywood

Cloud adoption keeps spreading from industry to industry. Just as we wrapped SNW with the Flash Cube last week in Santa Clara—where cloud was an increasingly hot topic of discussion—today we turned our attention to the annual NAB Show in Vegas, where “cloud storage” kicked off the show in high gear.

Nirvanix, which has been on a marketing stampede lately with new partnerships with companies like Riverbed and a ramping customer base, just linked up with Front Porch Digital to provide the cloud storage back-end for the company’s DIVAsolutions software portfolio.

Who the heck is Front Porch Digital?

Well apparently these guys have their content management software and digital asset management software installed in nearly every major broadcaster, movie studio and post production house in Hollywood. We are talking Petabytes of capacity that touches their software—everyday. Software that, right now, exists on physical machines—on-site storage that people have to acquire, manage, maintain and, eventually, re-buy all over again.

image With Nirvanix integrated as the cloud storage back-end, these studios can make the move from fixed hardware to the usage-based/pay-by-the-drink pricing and maintenance-free benefits of the enterprise cloud. This notion has been the topic of conversation around the storage circles for years and now is a reality.

As Front Porch Digital’s CMO, Phil Jackson, said “The integration of DIVASolutions and the Nirvanix Cloud Storage Network is just the beginning of a new strategic direction for Front Porch Digital. We see an increasing need for content distribution solutions within the enterprise and beyond. Media workflow can no longer be tied to local storage, our customers are demanding tightly integrated solutions for moving content securely around the globe to both further enhance internal collaboration, and better enable the complex business relationships that sustain the modern media enterprise.”

We are talking serious Petabytes of capacity that now exist on physical machines—and new Petabytes of data that have yet to be created—that both companies will be working with studios to move to the cloud. This is a massive business opportunity in this vertical for Nirvanix as the Media & Entertainment industry now has access to the enterprise cloud with software they already have on their floor.

Another reason this deal is a significant milestone is that studios are rushing to digitize their existing content, replicate it and store it in multiple locations. And, everything new that the studios are creating is in digital form, with HD and 3-D pushing file sizes to 4K, 8K and beyond. For these types of digital files, the cloud serves as an ideal access point for distributed content and collaboration. Because Nirvanix charges one flat rate for access to its cloud storage network—all bandwidth, replication, uploads and downloads—it makes sharing digital content over the cloud much more of a reality for media shops than companies like Amazon, which have hidden costs that come to bite you during the monthly billing cycle, as Dave Vellante recently pointed out.

As one studio in L.A. creates a scene for a movie, it can upload it to the Nirvanix cloud and another studio in Germany can download it and begin working on it the same day. That’s the power of the cloud that you just can’t achieve with yesteryear’s technology. Like other industries, Hollywood wants to shift to a OpEx model to store and access its valuable content—effectively Tier 1 data—and really drop the CapEx approach.

Like Symantec NetBackup, this is another business application that is shipping with a cloud back-end—basically with storage built-in, right out of the box. This leaves the big storage hardware pushers with no door to enter thru. They’re boxed out.

The news brings up a deeper set of questions:

-What if more business applications start shipping with integrated cloud back-ends?

-What is storage worked right out the box when you installed an app?

-How would this change the dynamics of buying and maintaining storage?

-How would this change the relationship between application owners and the IT Dept.?


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