Enterprise cloud storage provider Nirvanix has raised $25 million in Series C funding round led by Khosla Ventures with previous investors Valhalla Partners, Intel Capital, Mission Ventures and Windward Ventures participating in the round. The new investment brings Nirvanix’s total capital raised to $70M.

Nirvanix is a fully-managed, enterprise cloud storage service capable of storing, delivering and processing storage requests. It’s an alternative to Amazon Web Services, or Box.net. The company specializes in storing amounts of large unstructured content files, and offers usage-based pricing across public, hybrid and private cloud storage deployments.

Scott Genereux, President and CEO of Nirvanix, tells us that the platform is specifically designed for millions of users, billions of files and exabytes of data, which helps differentiate its offering from other cloud storage providers. “We’ve architected cloud storage specifically for large, unconstructed data files. The size of deals we are going after relates to the infrastructure we have. This is not consumer-grade storage that we are scaling up. This is very high-end,” he explains in an interview. “Box and Amazon are not architected for enterprise large data sets.”

Genereux was formerly SVP of Worldwide Sales and Marketing at QLogic and held executive roles at DataDirect Networks (DDN) and Hitachi before that. He took on the CEO role at Nirvanix in 2010.

For example, a movie studio could upload a film to the cloud (terabytes of data), which can then be accessed in another country for translation. Another differentiator, says Genereux, is Nirvanix’s ability to upload data once and have it be available in all data centers across the world. The Nirvanix geo-diverse namespace creates a logical pool across all deployed nodes in a public, hybrid or private cloud implementation. “Everything is interconnected, so there is real data collaboration on large files,” he explains.

Data recovery is another key feature for Nirvanix. If data stored in a primary location is unavailable for any reason, the cloud software autonomously serves up data to customers from a secondary or tertiary location while the software continuously checks the integrity of files and automatically repairs any potentially corrupted files in the background.

Customers include Cerner Corporation, IBM, USC Digital Repository, National Geographic and Relativity Media, VMWare and Cisco. NBCUniversal uses Nirvanix to store 3 Petabytes of data, including videos, photos, and movies. And Nirvanix actually built a replica of its Cloud Storage Network for IBM to sell as its own public cloud, called the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise.

Nirvanix is for customers used to buying on-premise hardware from EMC or NetApp and want to shift to cloud, Genereux adds.

“We look to bet on fundamental technology shifts that create big markets, and with Nirvanix we see two of these fundamental shifts occurring together: cloud and data,” said Khosla partner David Weiden. “The advantages of cloud computing are becoming more clear all the time, and it is inevitable that storage will also move to this architecture. Data, particularly unstructured data, is exploding in volume and ways to leverage it.”

Genereux says the company booked more revenue in Q1 of 2012 than nearly all of 2011. And he adds that over the past year Nirvanix has secured more petabytes under management than the prior three years combined; and deployed the largest private clouds in the world.

The company plans to use the funding to expand its engineering staff. The company will be opening a cloud competency center in Colorado, which will work on the next generation of solutions and innovations in the cloud storage space. Nirvanix also plans to increase the number of data centers it operates worldwide; adding 6 additional data centers to its current count of nine. And the infusion will be used towards sales and marketing efforts.

Enterprise cloud storage provider Nirvanix is adding more money to its coffers and putting an experienced executive at the steering wheel. The company has secured an additional $10M, bringing its total of capital raised to $45 million.

The capital infusion comes from primary investors Intel Capital, Mission Ventures, Valhalla Partners, and Windward Ventures.

In addition, Nirvanix has announced that it has appointed Scott Genereux as President and CEO. Genereux was formerly SVP of Worldwide Sales and Marketing at QLogic and held executive roles at DataDirect Networks (DDN) and Hitachi before that.

Genereux succeeds Jim Zierick who will continue to serve on Nirvanix’s Advisory Council.

The appointment of Genereux and securing additional capital should help Nirvanix expand market penetration of its Storage Delivery Network (SDN) on a global scale, the company says in a statement.

Nirvanix SDN is a fully-managed, cloud storage service capable of intelligently storing, delivering and processing storage requests in the best network location.

Basically, it’s an alternative to Amazon’s S3 service.

The partnership makes Nirvanix’s cloud storage service available to all of CDNetworks’ customers, who will be able to store an unlimited amount of data on Nirvanix’s servers and then push this data out to any of CDNetworks’ 63 worldwide distribution nodes.

The companies claim the partnership will save customers 80-90% of the costs associated with building out storage infrastructures of their own.

Nirvanix’s selling points are a claim that its service is easier to integrate than S3 and they offer a service level agreement that guarantees 99.9% uptime (see our previous coverage here.)

Nirvanix said the investment will be used to provide the company with “additional opportunities to further technology advancements of its Storage Delivery Network optimized for media applications”, and “to further accelerate its global build-out of storage nodes to meet swelling demand for its online storage service.”

The size of Intel’s investment was not available, although we did ask and were told that they were not willing to share it. Nirvanix closed a $12 million round earlier in the year that included Mission Ventures, Valhalla Partners and Windward Ventures.

Dynamo is not an alternative to S3, Amazon’s publicly-available data storage service, or competing Web hosting/storage services like Nirvanix and Flexiscale (see previous post). There are no plans at this point to offer Dynamo as a Web Service. It is an internal-only project that sounds like a rethinking of what a relational database should be when computing scales to massive Web proportions (i.e., systems running on tens of thousands of computers).

As Nick Carr puts it:

At the start of the last century, the great engineering project was the creation of an electric grid that could deliver power to millions of users with a reliability and an efficiency that were previously unthinkable. Today’s great engineering project, of which Amazon’s Dynamo is but one manifestation, is to build a computing grid that can achieve similar breakthroughs in the processing and delivery of information.

The race to create a Web operating system is heating up. It is such a huge undertaking that there are only a few companies—Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, IBM— that can tackle it. But this time around, it is unlikely that any one of them is going to own it outright.

See our recent coverage of Nirvanix, a U.S. based S3 competitor as well.

The company is positioning itself against Amazon by saying it’s easier to integrate than S3 and they offer a service level agreement to guarantee 99/9% uptime (Amazon does not offer an SLA).

Pricing is $0.18/GB/month for storage and $0.18/GB of data transferred. By comparison, Amazon charges $0.15/GB/month for storage, and $0.10/GB of data transferred in and $0.13-$0.18/GB of data transferred out.

The lack of a service level agreement at Amazon has led many startups to use it for backup purposes only, keeping primary storage under their direct control. They may find Nirvanix as an attractive alternative (and this may also give Amazon an incentive to add an SLA soon).

Nirvanix, however, is affiliated with MediaMax, which has recently gone through a hellish transition that left customers offline and furious. The connection between the two companies is going to create some marketing stress for Nirvanix as it rolls out its new service.

The company has raised $12 million in funding.

The company, which is affiliated with online storage startup MediaMax (aka Streamload), should also be announcing a $12 million round of financing in the near future. It’s not clear exactly how affiliated Nirvanix and MediaMax are, and the company is keeping the specifics of the relationship quiet for now. There has clearly been a technology swap, though, and MediaMax is now using the Nirvanix service to provide the back end of its storage product. Also, former MediaMax CEO Patrick Harr is now running the show at Nirvanix (MediaMax founder Steve Iverson has retaken the CEO spot at MediaMax).

While the company is keeping quiet about the funding and exactly how it’s affildiated with MediaMax, they are saying that they’ll be filling some of the perceived holes in S3. Hopefully they’ll be offering a service level agreement (Amazon doesn’t).

MediaMax, meanwhile, has been trying to pull through a hellish technology transition (my guess is it was related to the changeover to Nirvanix) that plagued them earlier this summer. They’ve moved their corporate blog to a new site, and are talking openly with users about some of the problems they’re facing.

Disclosure: I am an investor in Omnidrive, which is also in the online storage space and can be considered a competitor to MediaMax and Nirvanix.