Nirvanix Deal to Expand CloudSmart Storage

IBM and Nirvanix announced an agreement Wednesday that will incorporate the smaller firm’s cloud storage technology into Big Blue’s SmartCloud Enterprise offering.

“Under the terms of the agreement … IBM (NYSE: IBM) will include cloud storage technology from Nirvanix designed to enable customers to upload a file of any size from anywhere in the world and access it anywhere — as opposed to forcing customers to upload the same file multiple times in multiple geographic regions and imposing strict file size limitations,” a joint statement by the two companies said.

The idea is to give customers continuous access to data at multiple, redundant locations for the best possible performance as well as overall business continuity.

The storage service’s expansion is part of a comprehensive update to IBM’s SmartCloud cloud services platform that Big Blue announced Wednesday.

IBM’s SmartCloud storage service is designed to handle large amounts of unstructured data, including documents, spreadsheets, emails, presentations, and text messages. It will also store and retrieve information blobs that encapsulate data, metadata, and index in the same object, the companies’ statement said.

“With the integration of Nirvanix cloud storage technology, IBM’s SmartCloud Enterprise storage services will provide customers with a solution designed to support millions of users, billions of objects and exabytes of data to complement IBM’s existing security-rich, virtual server environments in the cloud,” it continued.

In addition, each node in the storage service understands what data is stored on nearby nodes, functioning as a massive, cross-connected grid, IBM said.

IBM claims that its SmartCloud storage services are particularly well-suited for deployments like medical and healthcare data that need to be retained for regulatory compliance, for media and entertainment data that need to be shared across multiple sites for content production and collaboration, and for infrequently accessed and unstructured financial data stored in differing formats.

Stuart J. Johnston is a contributing editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @stuartj1000.

This article was originally publsihed on InfoStor.