Hi all,

 I have been using Nirvanix for more than a year and I have been very satisfied with the service and the support. however, this time I have to write a "complaint" post, but I really feel this is necessary.

 When I chose Nirvanix over S3 it was mainly because of the intuitive API, its functionalities  and because I also wanted to give credit to a challenger in the cloud market.

 I remember we have discussed quite a few improvements in terms of functionalities as well as for the API. Just to name a few, Zipping, ItemID, customers billing based on consumptions (e.g Amazon DevPay) etc etc. 

I have read that the items are on the list, but we really don't have much visibility on when and if they will ever be implemented.

 In the past year I have seen several releases of infrastructure improvements and customer portal improvements, but basically nothing about the API and new functionalities. Don't get me wrong, I am not saying infrastructure is not important, but it's the balance that I am questioning.

In that sense I am disappointed as I  was hoping to see more innovation and more distinguishing factors for Nirvanix.

I would really appreciate feedback other users and an open discussion

 kind regards

 Luca Fracassi

 Hello Luca,

I appreciate the feedback on our system, it helps us understand from an outside perspective.  I want to assure you that we have looked in depth at all of the items above.  Below is a breakdown of each feature and some of the challenges they have presented.

Tar / Zip, Untar / Unzip

The process of zipping a file on our system has some significant challenges due to the background processing being very intensive.  We currently do not have a solution that would allow this to be done in a reasonably inexpensive way.  We are continuing to think this through but it will take more investigation.

ItemID

We have spent a considerable amount of time planning for the ItemID but this is not a simple change as it involves every API.  Because of this the planning for handling it as an input has become a large project and will take time.  There are plans to make this available and it is a very important goal but not one that can be taken lightly.

End-user Billing

The ability to do this requires a much larger structure for handling micro-payments and we feel there have not been sufficient requests to merit such a large scale implementation of a billing system.  We instead have been focusing on getting our system ready to handle reports that will allow you to do this yourself.

Some future items we are planning for in the near term:

 * More platforms for CloudNAS - adding more Windows versions and 64 bit.
 * Custom download headers - the ability to define custom headers for files.
 * Setting metadata during upload - Setting metadata for headers during the upload process.

I want to bring focus to what we have delivered in terms of making our service more accessible and easier to use over the last year.  Just to bring some awareness of what we have done I posted it on the developers blog.

http://developer.nirvanix.com/blogs/developer_blog/archive/2009/06/20/a-feature-review.aspx

The outside view may not seem like there have been that many improvements but our development team has been quite busy bringing what we think is a great service.  We do consider what everyone asks for in terms of functionality but we must first ensure our base business is sound and that revolves primarily around usability, performance and reliability.

Regards,
      Barry R.

 Hi Barry,

 thanks for the reply, it really brings clarity on the status of the items mentioned.

I fully understand the explanation and the rationale behind it. It is all much more clear now and I have a good idea of what to expect for the future.

I personally believe that Nirvanix is missing some opportunities that could help differentiate from S3 and win some current S3 customers, but it's just my personal opinion and very much debateable.

Thanks again for your clear answer, very much appreaciated

 ciao

Luca