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EMC dives into Iron Mountain's cloudy backup lair

Ferrous Hillock offers cloud backup, replication and DR

Backup, replication and DR services are being offered to EMC customers by backup bods Iron Mountain, thanks to it hosting Data Domain and Avamar replication targets in its data centres.

Iron Mountain is a tape and paper archival storage service based in an old iron mine in Livingston, New York, used for growing mushrooms when iron mining stopped there in 1936.

When mushroom growing fell on hard times in 1950 the owner shifted to storing paper and microfilm records in the mine to preserve them in case of a nuclear attack. Storing tape backups offsite was a natural progression

Now EMC customers can have backup and replication data sent over network links to what is, in effect, an Iron Mountain cloud.

Iron Mountain S-veep Eileen Sweeney, the general manager of its data management business, beamed out a canned quote: “Our collaboration with EMC means companies can protect their data offsite, improve their disaster recovery processes and benefit from the scalability and efficiency that the cloud provides.”

Iron Mountain had a previous cloud venture which crashed and burned in 2011, after activist investor Elliott Management prodded the Rusty Eminence’s management into changing its CEO and selling the cloud biz off.

Autonomy bought the ashes for $380m, getting Iron Mountain’s eDiscovery business, online backup and recovery operations. HP then bought Autonomy for billions – and, as any fule no, later lost billions on the deal by writing down Autonomy's value.

Iron Mountain's recovery from its cloud storage fiasco is gathering pace.

In November 2011 the Mountain teamed up with NetApp to offer cloud medical data archiving and disaster recovery to healthcare organisations, using NetApp’s StorageGRID technology.

In December last year the Ferrous Pile began offering cloud-based backup, recovery and disaster recovery (DR) services using Seagate kit and EVault software.

Now the Steely Peak is working with EMC customers to offer backup, DR and replication in the cloud using Data Domain and Avamar kit.

Iron Mountain has decisively moved away from offering general cloud archival storage facilities. Instead it has a nice niche cloud strategy:

  • Partner with a backup/archive storage system vendor
  • Host its products in an Iron Mountain data centre
  • Offer cloud backup, replication and DR services to that vendor’s customers using this kit

Perhaps it’s talking to CommVault and SpectraLogic about similar deals? HP too, maybe.

Find out more here. ®

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