On the heals of the massive Box.net funding and turn down of $600 million buy out from Citrix, IBM is making their own big moves with one of the fastest growing cloud startups: Nirvanix. IBM is launching a platform is a service called SmartCloud Service by inking a 5 year deal with fast growing cloud startup Nirvanix – IBM release here.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Nirvanix today announced the integration of cloud storage technology from Nirvanix as part of an expanded IBM SmartCloud Enterprise storage services portfolio available to customers worldwide.

Collaboration and storage are the hottest areas in cloud, and IBM will not be left out in the cold. IBM has a huge portfolio of assets as well as an army of services personnel. Now with Nirvanix they get a huge element for their cloud strategy. For Nirvanix. it’s a huge market moving deal that will throw off tons of cash flow.

IBM will include cloud storage technology from Nirvanix designed to enable customers to upload a file of any size from anywhere in the world and access it anywhere, as opposed to forcing customers to upload the same file multiple times in multiple geographic regions and imposing strict file size limitations. This is designed to provide customers with continuous access to data at multiple, redundant locations for optimal performance and business continuity.

With the integration of Nirvanix cloud storage technology, IBM’s SmartCloud storage services will provide customers with a solution designed to support millions of users, billions of objects and exabytes of data to complement IBM’s existing security-rich, virtual server environments in the cloud.

“Nirvanix’s cloud storage services offer the advanced, production-grade cloud storage capabilities that are built on experience with hundreds of enterprises,” said Jan Jackman, Vice President, Global Cloud Services, IBM. “The company’s presence and strong adoption in leading Fortune 500 corporations makes its cloud storage technology ideally suited to IBM’s global customer base.”

“We look forward to teaming with IBM in the enterprise cloud storage space and cooperatively enhancing our leading cloud storage service for the most demanding IBM global customers,” said Scott Genereux, President and CEO of Nirvanix.

IBM is playing in lots of cool areas in cloud – services (see our servicesangle.com site), big data, storage appliances with the rebranded Storwize, and of course they have a software stack that is positioned perfectly for the high performance computing market, and now an Amazon killer for the enterprise with Nirvanix.

IBM’s new SmartCloud storage service is ideally suited for unstructured data such as documents, spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, health records, images, audio and video files, and e-mail and text messages, as well as for storing objects in which data, metadata and index are all encapsulated as one blob. To help ensure prompt access to unstructured data and objects, each node within the IBM SmartCloud storage service knows what is stored in its neighboring nodes, essentially performing as a massive, cross-connected grid.

The IBM SmartCloud storage service is ideal for Tier 3 or Tier 4 data, such as:

• Media and Entertainment: content that must be shared across data centers, cities, states or countries—for distributed content creation and production collaboration
• Healthcare: data that must be retained for regulatory compliance and the protection and security of personally identifiable healthcare information (PIHI)
• Financial Services: infrequently accessed unstructured content, such as backup data, archival data, and any data that resides on tape
Additional details confirmed are that IBM and Nirvanix have signed a 5yr deal.

Overall this is a huge deal for startup Nirvanix which gets big time validation from IBM. IBM is known for their due diligence so the underlying message in this deal is that Nirvanix is best in class. I’ve been hearing throughout the industry that this is the case. Now IBM has validated it. IBM doesn’t touch anything unless it passes the product quality and revenue generating business cases.

From a competitive standpoint the new IBM Smart Cloud Storage Services goes right at the offerings from Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, Google, Box.net, Dropbox, HP, EMC , Rackspace, and Oracle.

Cloud storage is hot and IBM just got hotter.