Nirvanix Shutdown Leaves Customers, Partners Scrambling

Cloud storage service provider Nirvanix is pulling the plug on its services. The San Diego-based company announced Monday it was shutting down. And as much as it’s a loss for any cloud provider to come to an end, it has created a huge headache for not just its customers but also its cloud services broker partners.

Nirvanix has been building itself up over the last couple of years—even through this past spring when it appointed former Zyngeo CIO Debra Chrapaty as its CEO. Whether Nirvanix was already in trouble in March when we reported on Chrapaty’s appointment is unknown, but something has certainly gone wrong within the company.

Unfortunately, customers and partners are going to be left scrambling. Nirvanix is already in shutdown mode, and the company has notified its customers and partners they have until Sept. 30 to get their data off of its servers. What will happen should they fail to get that data off Nirvanix’s cloud service is unknown, and the cloud services provider has yet to make a public statement regarding its shutdown.

In an email our editors received following Nirvanix breaking the news to its partners, Champion Solutions Group CEO Christopher Pyle commented on the situation: “This is really bad. They told me that all current clients as of tomorrow can not replicate their storage to the Nirvanix cloud and must be out be September 30.”

Not a good time frame. Two weeks to find an alternate provider, get set up and get everything migrated over at the same time that every other Nirvanix customer is doing the same thing? I can only imagine the panic Nirvanix customers are currently experiencing.

Of course, cloud services brokers are left facing an even more dire situation. After all, since when do customers blame anybody but their trusted advisers when things go wrong with a cloud service? A cloud services broker is essentially vouching for the cloud companies it deals with, so when one up and folds like Nirvanix did, it causes a mad dash to help customers migrate their data to another provider and also undeservingly calls into question the broker’s judgment.

Either way, it’s a bad situation to be in. Pyle probably put it best in his email.

“As a cloud broker, this really sucks.” No kidding.