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FreeDrive Chooses the Nirvanix Storage Platform for Its Facebook Application

Posted on: Thursday, 13 December 2007, 09:00 CST

Nirvanix today announced that FreeDrive has selected, implemented and now officially launched its service using Nirvanix's Storage Delivery Network, a global online storage platform optimized for media applications. FreeDrive is a personal online storage and file sharing application that works across social networks. With today's announcement, FreeDrive is now available first as a Facebook application enabling its registered users to host and share photos, videos, music and documents among their existing Facebook friends and groups. FreeDrive has exited its beta period with over 100,000 users and is expected to register another one million users conservatively over the next six months.

FreeDrive offers customers 1 GB of free storage that serves as an Internet hard drive while providing online access to files that can then be linked and posted to Facebook. Prior to partnering with Nirvanix, FreeDrive hosted, stored and delivered these files in a Tier-1 co-location site on hardware they had to purchase, maintain and service. The costs associated with purchasing storage commensurate to their growth forecasts and managing the storage became prohibitive and stifled the company's aggressive expansion plans so FreeDrive looked into other options.

"When we began passing several terabytes of storage, we were faced with the decision whether to continue providing it ourselves or go through an outside vendor," said Michael Witz, Chairman and Founder of FreeDrive. "Going with an outside provider was more economical and saves us time and energy. We heard about Nirvanix and Amazon S3. Going with Nirvanix was a real easy choice. Nirvanix provided a high level of customer service while Amazon was more of a 'do-it-yourself' proposition. Nirvanix's technology is further along than Amazon's with value-added media management tools already built in and an API that worked with our backend. And, providing online storage to outside companies isn't exactly Amazon's core business focus. We didn't want to risk our business on them."

Another factor that led FreeDrive to choose Nirvanix was its ability to allow a direct connection to user files from the application. Amazon S3 holds data but transfers that information to the company, which then has to serve it to the application, Witz said, amounting to being charged for bandwidth twice.

"As the volume of user-generated content grows every day so too does the need for fast, efficient and cost-effective storage solutions," said Jonathan Buckley, Chief Marketing Officer at Nirvanix. "Nirvanix's Storage Delivery Network is simply the best choice for developers, like FreeDrive, who are building storage-heavy Facebook applications or web-services apps that need to scale really fast. Our ability to reduce hardware and management costs associated with storing and delivering media-related data means that these companies can better spend their time developing their applications rather than worrying about building server farms and storage silos in order to get their businesses off the ground."

Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network (SDN)

Nirvanix provides a platform for developers and businesses to integrate secure web based storage and delivery into any application. The Nirvanix SDN addresses the challenges associated with the explosive growth of user-generated content and the corresponding demand for storage. The platform, powered by the patent-pending Internet Media File System (IMFS), empowers developers with a powerful, yet affordable solution for storing and distributing user-generated content and other digital media. It provides dynamic load balancing for peak performance; intelligent uploading/downloading to accelerate access; clustered architecture for enhanced data protection; and global namespace for unlimited scalability. The platform is fully redundant in every layer of its infrastructure, includes RAID-6 data protection, is supported by 24/7 operations, and comes with the industry's only guaranteed service level agreement.

About Nirvanix

Nirvanix's customers include some of the world's leading media application vendors. Nirvanix is the premier provider of Internet storage optimized for media. The Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network (SDN) dramatically shortens time-to-market, reduces costs, and provides flexibility and control for business integrating Internet-scale online storage to their applications. Founded in 2007, Nirvanix is a privately held company headquartered in San Diego, California. For more information about the company and its services, visit www.nirvanix.com.

About FreeDrive

FreeDrive is a personal storage and file sharing service designed for users of social networks, such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. With just a single FreeDrive account, users can access both their own files and their friend's files from within any social network they happen to be on. By focusing exclusively on building a service to support social networks, FreeDrive makes it easier than ever for friends to share files between friends. To set up a free FreeDrive account, please visit, http://www.FreeDrive.com or on Facebook, http://apps.facebook.com/freedrive.

Source: Business Wire

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