EMC Does Storage as a Service

EMC recently revealed a little of its plans for Mozy, its online back up acquisition — and promised lots more to come.

EMC’s initial service for Mozy is a hosted backup offering for desktops, laptops and remote Windows servers built on a new platform the company calls EMC Fortress, a secure, scalable infrastructure that will also power future software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings.

Asked if EMC plans future services offerings such as hosted e-discovery, Roy Sanford, vice president of marketing and alliances for EMC’s new SaaS division, said, “Have a look at EMC’s application portfolio and let your mind run wild.”

For now, the service is limited to Windows-based PCs and servers. EMC provides users with services such as security, backup and recovery, data de-duplication, billing and metering for what Sanford said is a total cost of ownership (TCO) that is 30 percent better than an in-house solution.

Sanford said the Fortress platform was built to “scale radically, with low variable costs,” allowing the company to operate profitably. The disk-based infrastructure is “triple protected,” offering “substantially more” protection than RAID-6, he said. EMC’s RSA Security Division provides integrated key management, authentication and authorization.

Desktop and laptop pricing is $5.25 a month per desktop/laptop, plus 70 cents a month for each gigabyte protected. Windows Servers are $9.25 and $2.35 per gigabyte a month.

Sanford described the pricing as “much lower than three-quarters of the offers we’ve seen.”

The service offers six restore options, plus a disk seeding option for initial backups.

After years of failing to live up to its early promise, the online backup market has been heating up in recent months, with the entrance of heavyweights like EMC and IBM.

“It has taken a little while for customers to become comfortable” with the utility model, Sanford said, but data protection benefits, cost savings and the ability to stay on top of new technologies cheaply is winning converts.

MozyEnterprise powered by EMC Fortress is available immediately in North America through EMC and its reseller partners, with plans to offer the service internationally later this year. Verizon Business will also offer the new service.

Adapted from Internetnews.com.