Lions, Tigers, Bears–Oh My! Nat’l Geographic Goes Nirvanix

Nirvanix, one of the most progressive of the new enterprise cloud storage providers, has been making news lately.

First of all, whenever a customer with the international reputation of the National Geographic Society decides to cast its lots with your storage service, you’re probably doing something well. That’s the call Nirvanix got recently.

Then on March 26, the San Diego-based company announced the availability of direct connections from customers to its cloud storage network in Equinix data centers. The advantage of this direct connection is that Equinix customers are able to establish a private network connection between their owned or managed IT infrastructure and the Nirvanix Cloud Storage Network in the same data center. Management is way easier that way.

Nirvanix’s Cloud File System can support literal big data: millions of users, billions of objects and exabytes of data. That’s part of what attracted National Geographic.

The Society moved its backup and active archive of large unstructured multimedia files to the Nirvanix network to obtain better safety and access to all those millions of content items.

“We had everything–all of our photos, videos, documents, publications, records–in our own physical storage racks in Washington, D.C., for a lot of years,” Dan Backer, the NGS’s Director of Infrastructure Systems, told eWEEK. “We were also backed up at another location, but it wasn’t all that simple to access all those files, nor was the safest place to be in the event of a natural disaster. The [Nirvanix] cloud really solves all those issues.”

The NGS had to find an alternative to the traditional approach of continually buying physical storage capacity for the archives, Backer said.

“Nirvanix gives us the on-demand scalability and bandwidth we needed to back up and archive our massive digital content with a true pay-by-the-drink model. Most importantly, we can be sure that our data is continuously accessible by keeping multiple live replicas in the cloud in multiple geo-diverse locations,” Backer said.

Equinix is one of the largest data center services and co-location providers in the world. It features high-bandwidth connectivity for high-volume data transfer, enabling efficient uploads or downloads of large amounts of data from the Nirvanix network.

Hybrid cloud storage is also an option. With a Nirvanix Hybrid Cloud Storage node deployed within an Equinix data center and a direct connection, users can maintain cloud storage capacity on premises for frequently accessed data plus have the ability to access the public cloud for on-demand capacity and bandwidth, avoiding cloud-bursting during peak business hours.

The service is currently available in Equinix data centers in New Jersey; Frankfurt, Germany; and Tokyo.