Joyent and Nirvanix Working To Corner the Cloud Computing & Storage Market

Cloud computing and storage are converging and two companies are standing out above the pack in terms of leadership – Joyent and Nirvanix.

Joyent and Nirvnaix are ripe for acquisition and I have heard that both have been been approached by possible suitors. Not sure about Nirvanix but I have heard Joyent has turned away possible suitors. Joyent and Nirvanix represents a couple of big pieces on the chess board from the startup market with respect to cloud computing and storage platform. Getting both the developer community and big commercial deals is the holy grail in any emerging growth market.

Cloud computing is validated by Joyent’s announcement today of $85 million in fresh money for global expansion. The lastest round of funding for Joyent is likely a play to raise the value of the company in an acquisition strategy to get an exit. When you see funding at this level what it means is that they are trying to set the M&A market. Setting the private round of funding valuation sets the buy out price.”

With respect to Nirvanix, they are nailing the big commercial deals that are in the petabyte storage range.

I recently attended the Valhalla Partners StorageFest II event in New York, where a crew of heavy hitters gathered to discuss the state of the cloud and big data markets, and we walked away not only impressed with the caliber of the event—as Dave Vellante tweeted about—but also with the rampant growth of one of Valhalla’s portfolio companies, Nirvanix.

While we knew Nirvanix was doing well in 2011, our meetings confirmed that the company had a massive Q4, with a slew of multi-petabyte wins at big tier one enterprise shops.

Word on the street is that Nirvanix grew in excess of 150% in 2011, and is poised to more than double that growth in 2012. Under the new management team recruited by CEO Scott Genereux, these guys are dropping the hammer on competitive cloud offerings and causing a firestorm in the enterprise cloud storage space.

When you add up just the publicly announced wins in recent months, it becomes clear that Nirvanix is taking market share from the big guys at some major shops. With 8.5 petabytes at USC, 3 petabytes at Cerner, 500 terabytes at Advocate Healthcare, 2 petabytes at NBCUniversal—these guys have more capacity under management with just 4 customers than most companies billing themselves as cloud storage providers have in their whole install base.

As we’ve documented on SiliconAngle before, Nirvanix is unique in the cloud space because of their proprietary software IP that lets them help enterprise accounts basically do things that just can’t be done with either existing legacy storage boxes from the big players or self-service consumer-grade clouds like Amazon.

Whether you choose a public or private cloud from Nirvanix, the whole thing is fully managed as a service with pay-by-the-drink pricing. They’re not asking you to buy a bunch of hardware and support it yourself, they’re managing the whole infrastructure and software stack as a service and giving you a monthly bill.

Word at the StorageFest II event was Nirvanix has the data consistency software in the cloud that no one else has come close to—with some projecting their lead to be as much as 24 months out. It’s this data consistency software with a geo-aware namespace that pretty much brings to reality the type of cloud solution that executives like Tom Georgens of NetApp have been saying customers are looking for: The real challenge now, Mr. Georgens says, “is building for scale, clustering lots of people’s information and managing it like a big pool over a big geography.”

Joyent and Nirvanix represent the new architecture real time computing and storage where IO and net based infrastructure power a new class of apps.

I’ll be at Nodesummit this week cranking away on this new area going deep on the node.js stuff. Very compelling trend.