Not knowing geographically
where your data is stored in a cloud system has been an annoyance for many
enterprise IT managers who back up their data or store archives in a cloud
service. After all, geography does matter, especially since natural phenomena
like hurricanes and earthquakes can happen at any time.
Cloud-storage specialist Nirvanix is one service provider that has seized
upon this smoldering worry and put a fire hose to it.
The San Diego, Calif.-based
company on Aug. 26 announced that due to the impending impact of Hurricane
Irene on the Eastern seaboard, it is giving customers currently storing data in
its Node 4 data center in New Jersey the option to move their data to other
locations in the Nirvanix Cloud Storage Network—either on a temporary or
full-time basis. And it's not charging anything for the move.
All of Nirvanix's
carrier-class data centers are fully redundant, including diesel generator
power backups and UPS to maintain full power at all times—even during rolling
blackout periods—to ensure the company's data centers are running 24 hours a
day, 7 days a week.
Nonetheless, for those
customers seeking extra peace of mind, Nirvanix is enabling customers to select
where they would like their data to reside. Data relocation options outside of
New Jersey include two data centers in the U.S. (Los Angeles and Dallas), one
in Frankfurt, Germany, and one in Tokyo.
"We are standing by
ready to assist our customers as they face an unprecedented natural disaster
which President Obama referred to as a 'historic hurricane,'" said
Nirvanex President and CEO Scott Genereux. "By storing their data in the
Nirvanix cloud, customers benefit from the transparent movement of data from
one region to another with no impact to their business operations."
Without the cloud, IT analyst
David Vellante of Wikibon.org said, a company with a single data center would
need to buy the equivalent amount of storage capacity, networking gear,
servers, replication and software licenses and find another data center to
power up, cool and move all their data to it.
"For years, we've been
talking about anticipatory staging of data around disasters, and now the cloud
is the ultimate realization of that," Vellante said. "The Wikibon
community continues to document the business importance of the cloud, and in
situations such as this, having access to multiple data centers to move your
data around is critical.
"Clearly at a moment's
notice the cloud provides companies with levels of flexibility that they never
had available with IT before," Vellante said.
To learn more about this
program, contact Nirvanix.
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