We just covered the big IBM cloud announcement yesterday and now more action in cloud storage. In recent months we’ve heard enterprise storage companies rachet up its claims of being a enterprise cloud storage player. These companies are claiming that they are delivering enterprise cloud storage to Fortune 500 companies. We are not seeing that kind of uptake, but we are seeing some proof points in some areas.

For example, Box.net a leader in the gigabyte scale consumer market and Nirvanix is a leader in the petabyte scale enterprise market.

However, in a span of 24 hours, two large deals emerged on the scene for enterprise cloud storage which to many peoples’ surprise weren’t awarded to EMC —instead they went to Nirvanix. Yesterday IBM Global Services announced that it selected Nirvanix for its enterprise cloud deployments—which we covered and today, Cerner Healthcare announced that it selected Nirvanix for a multi-petabyte (we hear north of 3PB) private cloud storage deployment.

We’re talking about an OEM deal with the biggest IT services company in the world and a private cloud installation with a $2B publicly-traded healthcare provider—this is big business. This isn’t a trivial cloud storage deal like the “almost four terabyte” win recently announced by other startups. Rather, these are big boy deals that will have a material revenue impact on Nirvanix and its growth plans.

Consumer plays may not translate to enterprise. What’s surprising is that Box.net enterprise solutions aren’t in the running for these kinds of deals. So for all its talk about being enterprise-ready, Box.net is really not. The consumer side Box.net is great – enterprise – not yet.

Enterprise customers are looking for petabyte-scale experience—not gigabyte-scale implementations. While Nirvanix is dealing with customers putting petabytes of data in its cloud, other cloud storage startups are grappling with users sharing photos of friends and family verses real sensitive corporate information required by the big enterprises.

There is no 256-bit AES encryption—the only encryption they do from the customer side is SSL, which is not considered enterprise-grade by anyone. Enterprise customers are also limited to 15GB file sizes—which is better than OpenStack at 5GB—but others offer unlimited file size uploads these days.

As many corporations are looking to consolidate their overall cloud usage under a single provider with secure multi-tenancy to lower their costs and track where their data is actually being stored, this could work against Box as they try to make further inroads in the enterprise market.

Here is the healthcare solution as announced by Cerner (cube cohost Dave Vellante is quoted in the release).

Nirvanix today announced that Cerner (Nasdaq: CERN), a nearly $2 billion health care solutions provider, will deploy as part of their Cerner Skybox solutions, a new on-demand managed storage service offering based on a Nirvanix Private Cloud Storage solution. The Cerner Skybox Storage™ service enables Cerner’s clients to consolidate PACs, radiology, lab, clinical systems and patient records in a secure enterprise-grade cloud storage environment.

Cerner has initially deployed a multi-petabyte scalable private node of cloud storage located within its data centers, fully maintained as a service by Nirvanix. The Nirvanix Cloud File System™ enables Cerner to provide usage-based pricing for its health care clients and a true global namespace that ensures instant content access regardless of location.

With the Nirvanix private cloud storage solution, Cerner can offer its clients enterprise-grade cloud storage designed from the ground up for optimal data availability. This solution is capable of supporting millions of users and billions of objects, with built-in software capabilities that provide for continuous data consistency and a self-healing cloud that performs continuous data integrity checks on all stored files and automatically repairs corrupt files.

“Our objective is to optimize processes and enable the use and sharing of information across the health care industry,” said Tony Linville, vice president of Infrastructure Services at Cerner. “To that end, we are positioned to lead the way in the adoption of cloud storage in the health care industry. We believe that the economics and elasticity of cloud storage based on Nirvanix technologies will provide our clients a secure solution which eases collaboration and drives down costs.”

“Cerner is a thought leader and a visionary in the healthcare sector,” said Dave Vellante, President of IT think tank Wikibon.org. “This large-scale deployment is yet another strong indicator that cloud adoption is going increasingly mainstream. While many traditional healthcare providers are struggling to figure out their cloud storage strategies, Cerner is driving innovation in the sector and focusing on delivering trusted cloud solutions today.”

“The benefits of the cloud are spreading across a multitude of industries,” said Scott Genereux, President and CEO, Nirvanix. “Our cloud storage technology is ideally suited for the health care industry as it was designed from the ground up to accommodate massive files, which is critical for the unstructured data that is so prevalent in this space.”

Nirvanix cloud storage technology also helps Cerner protect and secure personally identifiable health care information, ensuring that all files stored in the cloud are obscurificated as Nirvanix software de-identifies each physical file, removing the file name, owner and type.

Combined with military-grade, multi-level security at the user, data storage and physical data center levels, Nirvanix enables Cerner to deliver the most advanced cloud storage service in production in the health care sector today.