In their ongoing coverage of Oracle Open world 2013, John Furrier spoke with Leo Leung, VP of Product Marketing for Oxygen Cloud in theCUBE. Oxygen Cloud had several joint customers using the now defunct Nirvanix as the storage underneath Oxygen. The three discuss Oxygen Cloud’s developments over the year and responses to joint customers affected by the Nirvanix closing and what the shutdown reveals about risk with cloud.

Leung sees the space around cloud and storage is maturing. Oxygen hasn’t focused so much on growth this year according to Leung. Rather, the company has placed emphasis on enhancing options for use-cases like mobile access. Leung says, “It’s been a phase where we’ve been scaling those customers into very large deployments.”

Although cloud service provider, Nirvanix recently shutdown, Furrier says “ultimately they had a good story” in their storage offerings given that “people want cloud storage, sharability and data protection.” Presently, Nirvanix has not released any information concerning closing on their website. However, David Marashall of InfoWorld reports, “Numerous media and analyst reports say the company has been informing its customers and partners of its impending doom. The company is also reportedly telling its customers and partners that they can no longer replicate their storage or upload any more data to the Nirvanix cloud.”

Furrier asks how Oxygen Cloud can help Nirvanix customers given that they had approximately three weeks to move their data – not a lot of time. Leung says Oxygen’s storage broker was useful helping such customers as it allows for working on multiple clouds and on-premise storage at the same time. Leung welcomes Nirvanix customers who are trying to retrieve data.

In essence, the Nirvanix challenge is what cloud is all about – as Furrier puts it, “This is a disaster recovery situation.” He asks Leung, “Are you afraid customers are going to be fearful with Nirvanix? Are you guys marketing against that?” He notes that this challenge may present “opportunities in a customer environment where they have to move things around fast.” Oxygen Cloud. Leung agrees stating, “You have to understand what you’re getting into and understand what you’re actually using it for… The way we’re helping customers is because people want to use it as if they were using local storage or if they want to use it to complement what they already have. [If] they have that type of understanding, then it’s actually easy to adopt the cloud.” He adds, to think that you can use cloud without risk, “that’s a mistake.”