Mozy on Over
With all this talk of clouds, EMC has done something interesting and practical with them. If you purchase an Iomega external hard drive, you get access to a Windows or Mac friendly software bundle that integrates their Retrospect Express backup software, their Mozy online backup software, and 2GB of free online storage (or $4.95 for all-you-can-eat). So, in one fell swoop, you have seamless, integrated online and nearline backup. I think this is the perfect example of cloud computing (at least in 2008)—a service front-end and fully abstracted back-end.
Beyond the solution itself, I have to give EMC kudos on sound business strategy. For home and SMB users (there are different levels of Mozy service), this is an easy, painless way to significantly improve DR preparedness, especially since the use of Mozy now provides offsite storage. This is also a more forgiving market (less demanding customers, looser SLAs, less lawyers) for EMC to sharpen their operations, before going after the enterprise.
Finally, I think EMC has done a good job of stitching together three of their acquisitions (Iomega, Retrospect, and Mozy), maintaining individual brand equity, and yet still delivering that often promised, but rarely delivered 1+1=3 functionality.
Posted by Omar Sultan at 10:58AM PST
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