Chrapaty’s move isn’t a complete surprise, given that (a) cloud storage is hot, (b) Zynga is not and (c) Chrapaty has served as Nirvanix’s executive board chairwoman since November.

Chrapaty has the infrastructure chops to lead a company keen on expanding clouds. At Zynga, she oversaw the company’s switch from Amazon Web Services to its own specialized cloud. Earlier, she was in charge as Microsoft expanded its data center footprint. She has also been president and chief operating officer of E*Trade and senior vice president of the Collaboration Software Group at Cisco.

Based in San Diego, Nirvanix has racked up more than 1,200 customers and $70 million in venture funding. Backers include Khosla Ventures and Intel Capital. Peddling as it does public, private and hybrid clouds and cloud gateways for enterprises, it sees competitors in many directions, including Amazon and Microsoft on the public front, Dropbox and Box in the smaller-business area, and EMC and NetApp on the legacy-vendor stage.

Chrapaty nevertheless sounded optimistic as she talked about her new gig. “What I’m excited about for Nirvanix is we actually offer this unique solution that’s both public- and private-cloud based, highly available, secure for the enterprise, but also variable deployment models,” she said. “So we’re meeting a unique need for the Fortune 1000 companies.”

In the coming months, Nirvanix will make some decisions about expand its focus to products other than storage, which could distinguish it, but Chrapaty declined to go into detail about the possibilities. We’re eager to see the game plan, as it could bring more enterprises into the cloud-storage fold and make Nirvanix a bigger player.

What will come of Zynga? That’s a whole other story. Chrapaty is the latest executive to leave the one-time social-gaming star, and the stock has lingered under $4 since August.

Zynga on Monday sent a statement from its chief operations officer, David Ko, naming Chrapaty’s successor:

“We thank Debra for her leadership and contributions to Zynga over the past years and wish her luck in her future endeavors. Today, I am proud to announce that Dorion Carroll is moving into the role of Chief Information Officer effective immediately. Dorion is a 25-year engineering veteran with deep experience developing products and services as well as scaling teams from start-up phase to large companies. As one of our Zynga Fellows, Dorion has provided direction, leadership and management across numerous technology and products teams at Zynga over the past 3 years as well as being one of our most senior technology leaders. Our global network of players relies on the exceptional talent of our technology teams and the services they provide. We look forward to Dorion’s leadership to bring even more prioritization and focus to these teams.”

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Massive thunderstorms notwithstanding, the fact that Amazon’s U.S. East data center went down again Friday night while other cloud services hosted in the same area kept running raises anew questions about whether Amazon is suffering architectural glitches that go beyond acts of God. While most Amazon services were back up Saturday morning, the company was still working on provisioning the backlog for its ELB load balancers as of 5:31 p.m. eastern time, according to the AWS dashboard.

This outage — the second this month – took down Netflix , Instagram, Pinterest, and Heroku, as Om previously reported. The storm was undoubtedly huge, leaving 1.3 million in the Washington D.C. area without power as of Saturday afternoon, but Joyent, an Amazon rival, also hosts cloud services from an Ashburn, Virg. data center and experienced no outage, something its marketing people were quick to point out.

The implication is that Amazon, with all its talk about redundancy and availability, shouldn’t be having these issues if others are not.

Steve Zivanic, VP of marketing for Nirvanix, another rival cloud provider, said customers should simply stop defaulting to Amazon’s cloud.  ”It’s becoming rather clear that the answer for [Amazon's] customers is not to try to master the AWS cloud and learn how to leverage multiple availability zones in an attempt to avoid the next outage but rather to look into a multi-vendor cloud strategy to ensure continuous business operations,” Zivanic said via email. “You can spend days, months and years trying to master AWS or you could simply do what large-scale IT organizations have been doing for decades — rely on more than one vendor.”

Another #AWS outage -> Another #Heroku outage. You'd think #Heroku would be scrambling to architect around that as quickly as possible.—
Dave Roberts (@sandhillstrat) June 30, 2012

The fact that Amazon, like any other data center-dependent business is not bulletproof also raises questions about why its customers don’t pursue a multi-cloud strategy or, if they’re going to rely solely on Amazon, why they put so much of their workload in one geography —  a practice Amazon itself advises against. Of course, it isn’t good practice for any vendor to blame snafus on its customers.

Presumably the tech folks at Instagram, Heroku, et al. know better. Earlier this month,  I asked Byron Sebastian, the Salesforce.com VP of platforms who runs the Heroku business, if Heroku was actively seeking other cloud platform partners. He said the company is always evaluating its options.

Twitter was awash in comments. Many wondered why Amazon’s data center did not cut over to generator power while others, like Gartner analyst Lydia Leong preferred to wait to see what part Amazon’s data center operator played in this mess.

@cloudpundit Breakdown: grid power failed twice in June and AWS crashed twice same way. My dc in Ohio lost grid Fri, stays up on gen power.—
Brian McCallion (@BrianMcCallion) June 30, 2012

Reached for comment Saturday afternoon, an Amazon spokeswoman reiterated that the storm caused Amazon to lose primary and backup generator power to an availability zone in its east region overnight and that service had been mostly restored. She said the company would share more details in the coming days.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Bruce Guenter

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Scott Genereux, Nirvanix president & CEO

Cloud storage vendor Nirvanix will use $25 million from a new funding round led by Khosla Ventures to expand its engineering, global sales and marketing efforts.  Khosla is a new backer but current investors Valhalla Partners, Intel Capital and Windward Ventures also participated in this C Series round.

Founded in 2007 1998, Nirvanix was one of the first companies to focus on enterprise-class cloud storage. And now that market is really taking off as more CIOs are getting comfortable with the cloud model. But there is also a raft of competitors now  including public cloud giant Amazon Web Services, Box, Zetta, Egnyte, and Microsoft . There are many, many companies fighting to be the enterprise storage leader.

San Diego-based Nirvanix fields private, public and hybrid cloud storage services specifically for businesses with lots of unstructured data. The company claims IBM, Cerner, National Geographic and Relativity Media as customers.

In a statement, Nirvanix CEO Scott Genereux said business is growing fast — the company put more petabytes of data under management last year than in the prior three years combined.

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For cloud providers that want to compete with Amazon’s storage product but don’t want to set up an S3 sandbox for customers, Basho’s latest product can help.

The Cambridge, Mass. startup is now offering RiakCS cloud-based storage services as an option for infrastructure-as-a-service companies and other cloud providers that want to be compatible with Amazon storage services without getting  locked into the entire Amazon stack.

Taking on Amazon in cloud storage is a tough row to hoe given Amazon’s dominance. Still, there are many companies that want to move some storage to the cloud but can’t trust their digital stuff to a public cloud, like Amazon’s. To meet this need,  an emerging group of cloud players Tier3,  Opsource and others are building private cloud services to compete with Amazon Web Services in general and, in some cases, S3 storage in particular.

Building on Amazon to fight Amazon

Basho built its business with a close eye on Amazon. Its NoSQL database, launched in 2009, was based on an AWS white paper outlining the ideal distributed cloud database, according to Basho CMO Bobby Patrick.

RiakCS storage overlays multitenancy atop its Riak database and promises easy storage and access of simple objects. But most importantly, it pledges compatibility with Amazon’s storage API.  By virtue of Amazon’s dominance, the AWS APIs are becoming the de facto standard for cloud computing.

Per Basho’s press release:

RiakCS is compatible with the S3 API, providing an easy-to-use interface and allowing enterprises to use existing S3 tools and frameworks or import and extract Amazon data.

Prices for RiakCS start at $10,000 per storage server, including multi-data center replication and support. A 24TB server would thus cost about 40 cents/GB.

While RiakCS storage is based on the open-source version of the company’s Riak NoSQL database, it includes other proprietary software to handle multi-tenancy and support large object storage.

RiakCS, Basho targets the aforementioned  big cloud operators as well as big multi-national companies that typically require dedicated support.

Patrick said RiakCS’s ability to run on the cheapest commodity hardware and failover gracefully as needed, means that third party cloud providers really will be able to compete with Amazon on price.

Everyone into the cloud storage pool

The pool of available cloud-based storage options seems to get larger — and more confusing — by the day. Players include Nirvanix, Zettanet as well as Microsoft (with Azure storage), and Google (with Google Cloud Storage.)

Cloud storage is definitely gaining more credence among corporate IT departments wanting to cut costs. The question is how much money there really is in this opportunity as the various vendors appear to be in a race to the bottom, slicing prices on their cloud storage to win share. But it is also clear that there are many companies out there looking for a private, and more secure, cloud storage option. Basho could provide an important piece of that solution.

 Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user breahn

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Cloud storage is so popular because it’s relatively inexpensive and nearly infinitely scalable. It also provides a level of disaster protection, because unlike just adding more hard disks on-site, the data is actually stored in a different location. To this point, however, most cloud-storage offerings (e.g., Dropbox or Backblaze) target consumers or small businesses that have fewer security, availability and compliance restrictions than do large enterprises.

Other cloud-storage offerings, such as Amazon S3 and Rackspace Cloud Files, are object storage systems ideal for developers writing cloud-based applications. However, while they’re certainly not designed for consumers, neither were they designed with demanding enterprise users in mind.

Zetta's storage architecture

Zetta is one of a small number of companies targeting enterprise storage in the cloud, with the other big name being Nirvanix. Zetta offers a standard storage service in which its cloud appears just like another drive on a company’s network, as well as a replication-and-protection service called Zetta Data Protect. All of its services tout robust feature sets to ensure that data is always secure, available and recoverable.

Nirvanix, for its part, has raised $45 million. It has taken a somewhat different tactic, doing cloud backup via a REST API a la Amazon S3, but layering on enterprise features. Additionally, Nirvanix also sells hybrid and managed on-premise offerings.

However, while a lot of investment cash is pouring into cloud storage, and there’s a provider for nearly every audience, it’s still all about backup. Storing primary data in the cloud still sends shivers down the spines of risk-averse CIOs, for reasons of security, availability and performance. A few companies, such as Nasuni and StorSimple, tout primary storage in the cloud, but they rely on physical on-premise controllers to handle low-latency data access and certain security capabilities.

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user zzzack.

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Giga’s M&A experience while at HP was among the reasons Valhalla hired her, Director of Research Dan Gordon told me recently. “We’re in the manufacturing business,” he explained — as in manufacturing exits for the firm’s investments — and Giga knows firsthand how the process works within large vendors of the type that typically buy storage startups. According to Valhalla General Partner Charles Curran, the firm regularly connects with large storage vendors such as HP, EMC and NetApp, whereas many VCs focus their efforts solely on getting to know the entrepreneurs in which they’re investing.

However, Giga told me, she doesn’t lack in entrepreneurial spirit or know-how just because she spent nine years working for large vendors. She actually wanted to go the startup route out of college, but her career in the corporate world was going too well. Still, Giga said, she did get to do some entrepreneurial work at HP while wearing her strategy and business development hat, only she had a fair amount of resources to work with.

Giga looks like a particularly apt fit at Valhalla, which has made next-generation storage systems an area of particular focus. Among the company’s current investments are Nirvanix, which is really the only game in town for enterprise-class storage in the cloud, and SolidFire, which is targeting cloud computing providers with an all-flash storage array. Previously, Valhalla backed LeftHand Networks, which HP bought in 2008 for $360 million.

She said she’s particularly interested in both cloud storage and solid-state drives as hot investment areas, as well as big data. What she’s looking for, she added, are disruptive companies within these spaces that let IT departments operate faster and better without killing their budgets. Gordon noted that cloud storage and SSDs should be big winners if Valhalla’s larger vision of “video as the new text” plays out. Video, after all, requires lots of storage capacity on the cheap, which the cloud provides, and the performance that SSDs deliver.

It will be very interesting to watch how Giga’s storage-industry contacts and experience — and relative youth — affect Valhalla’s success in these spaces. As Curran pointed out, SSDs especially are gaining traction across industries as everything from virtualization to big-data processing have CIOs thinking about storage performance. And it’s a competitive space: He noted that Valhalla wanted in on Nimble Storage’s recent $25 million round, but was outbid. Artis Capital Management led that round, with Nimble’s existing investors Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital also chipping in.

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The move to CTO is both a big jump and a big opportunity for Froutan. Nirvanix is among the only cloud-storage services specifically targeting enterprise data; it operates a globally distributed storage infrastructure; it has begun pushing a hybrid offering that incorporates on-premise storage nodes; and it has raised $45 million since 2007. Prior to joining Google, Froutan was VP of engineering at Rackspace.

As a group of innovators discussed last week at Structure, there’s still plenty of opportunity for cloud-storage providers to improve their offerings in terms of energy efficiency and suitability for primary data. If Froutan can apply the lessons he learned at Rackspace and Google to Nirvanix’s business, both he and the company could come out golden as cloud storage grows from an estimated $1.5 billion in 2009 to $7 billion by 2014.

Feature image courtesy of Rod Trevaskus.

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