Paul Froutan, the chief technology officer at cloud storage startup Nirvanix, visited theCube again at VMworld 2011 (full video below – see 2nd half here).

Froutan joined Nirvanix from Google, where he was in charge of operating the company’s production; the search giant built about five new datacenters during the time he worked there.

Froutan said he joined Nirvanix because he has found potential in what the company has to offer, especially now that companies are starting to realize what a cloud is. He also got in the topic of cloud washing, noting that the so called real cloud companies will stick around in their existing market.

The Nirvanix exec laid out his definition of the term during the two-part interview with John Furrier and Dave Vellante; a cloud that enables a user to upload their data and “forget about it:”

“It’s all to handled inside the cloud,” he said. “The replication is, DR is, having a number of different copies of data, ensuring data integrity, ensuring data availability –it is all handled by the cloud.”

The emphasis is both on reliability as well as economics and speed of service. Nirvanix is after delivering that value to customers, and Froutan said that his company has “a couple interesting things coming up soon,” though without mentioning any details or a more specific timeframe.

Nirvanix is one example of a cloud company that’s looking to differentiate itself. Its offering does pack a few things other don’t according to its CTO, including data consistency and global object store. There’s no file size limit, compared to the 5GB maximum size in OpenStack storage, an open-source initiative which been accelerating fairly rapidly with an expanding partner ecosystem.


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