The last 30 days for Nirvanix have been on fire—first the big-scale OEM deal with IBM Global Services, then the announcement that Cerner Healthcare was deploying a 3 petabyte private cloud and today news hits that the University of Southern California (Go Pac 12) has shifted 8 Petabytes of unstructured data to a Nirvanix private cloud are clear indicators that there is a paradigm shift going on in the storage market.

These multi-petabyte sized cloud storage deals don’t usually go to an emerging tech start up like Nirvanix—in fact Cerner and USC are both long-time EMC customers—so to see such a rapid change in the cloud provider landscape is definitely a cause for pause and concern.

SiliconANGLE.tv #theCUBE hosted Nirvanix CEO Scott Genereux and CTO Paul Froutan on The Cube numerous times and they’ve made it clear—Nirvanix is taking all of the software and services that companies are used to in their public cloud—the global namespace, the data consistency software, the self-healing software—and selling it to companies in their own usage-based private cloud in their own data centers. So you’re basically buying a fully managed cloud service that just happens to reside in your own facilities; no maintainence fees, no technology refresh costs, no data migrations. All the benefits of a true public cloud in your own world.

Traditional storage hardware vendors aren’t doing this today and continue to push hardware solutions with a pay-me-up-front business model that requires customers to move to a new storage box every 24-36 months. Cloud storage model beyond Petabyte to Exabyte threatens the hardware model. I’ve said it’s a zero sum game in that the hardware needs to move somewhere to store the growth in data. It’s shifting to the cloud. Nirvanix is showing this is real.

Companies like Cerner and USC are quickly realizing that they can do more than acquire their own private cloud for internal storage needs, but that they can monetize it by reselling access to that cloud in their own vertical industries, as Dave Vellante pointed out.

Cerner is busy reselling their private cloud as a public cloud to hospitals worldwide and USC will be reselling their private cloud as a public cloud to anyone needing digital archival. Meanwhile, IBM will be reselling their private Nirvanix cloud as a public cloud to their enterprise customers worldwide in every industry.

Nirvanix has been posting triple digit quarterly growth this year and its cloud storage services are obviously resonating with key IT decision makers worldwide. As Wall Street loves to say—“whatever they got, it’s definitely selling.”

Usage-based private clouds—where companies have their own global namespace in their own private sandbox and don’t share resources with anyone else—may be the big ticket to get enterprises moving even faster to a cloud-based IT environment.

But no matter what way you look at it, the cloud space is smoking hot right now.