Intel Buys Into Nirvanix

This is a quick post to say hooray for Nirvanix and the consumer; both of which are better off after Intel bought into the SaaS company. Nirvanix recently announced that Intel had taken a stake in the company. Nirvanix hosts online storage solutions for a variety of Fortune 500 and Web 2.0 companies around the world. In other words, they are a direct competitor to Amazon’s S3 system (related blog post: Technology Story – December 16, 2007).

Nirvanix can boast over 100 customers, many of which are in the media vertical and personal online storage tools. So the Intel infusion should mean that they can broaden into more arenas that previously were unaware of them. Nirvanix said the capital would be used to further technology build out and meet the demand for its online storage system.

Amazon’s S3 is a similar system to the Nirvanix offering. S3 allows companies to incorporate storage into applications and web sites that is actually housed within the Amazon data centers, thereby freeing the application from handling the storage itself. Nirvanix’s Storade Delivery Network, which is a storage-as-a-service (SaaS) system, also allows developers to integrate storage of data into any number of applications or sites seamlessly with out the user being impacted.

As technology progresses what other types of processing or storage will be offloaded onto internet connected systems? Already we are seeing databases, storage and computing power migrating to the cloud in some early cases, but where might this go in the future? I can foresee desktop PC’s looking a lot like the Network Computer that Oracle tried to get us all to use a decade ago. I liked the tiny diskless computers a lot, they lacked the speed we needed, but they operating system was Java based which I loved. A decade ago high-speed access to the Internet was not a commodity like we have today. Perhaps we are primed for a new round of cloud computers hitting the market soon.