Storage As A Service Gets Vendor Backup

Another new entrant into this market is Scotts Valley, Calif.-based Seagate, the hard-drive manufacturer that jumped in feet-first with its January acquisition of EVault, a 10-year-old provider of managed storage services.

Richard Heitmann, vice president of product management at EVault, said Seagate acquired the company as a way to leverage its brand-name recognition to move into complementary businesses.

EVault offers its managed storage direct and through channel partners in three different flavors. Customers can sign up with solution providers to have their backups done online to EVault data centers on a per-Gbyte, per-month basis. They can also license EVault software to do managed backups using their own data center infrastructure. Or they can pay EVault a fee to manage their backups remotely.

Solution providers can resell the EVault software or its services, or can bundle EVault services with their own managed services offerings, Heitmann said.

Lee Bird, president of Btech, a Pasadena, Calif.-based provider of managed security services that has provided EVault's services to its customers for years, said he's interested in leveraging the bigger vendor's brand. "Not a lot of people know the EVault name, but Seagate is one of the top brand names."

The thing Bird likes best about the EVault service is that it is compliant with the SAS 70 auditing standard. "My third sentence with my client is, 'EVault is SAS 70-compliant,' " he said. "Their faces just light up."

Another company moving into this space is Iomega, the small-business storage hardware vendor that last year purchased a San Diego-based managed services provider, CSCI, and unveiled plans to use its worldwide solution provider base to bring managed services to small-business customers.

Tom Kampfer, president and COO of Iomega, San Diego, said the company is actively working on getting its managed services ramped up for the channel, and is already signing up solution providers. "We expect to see storage as a service this year," Kampfer said. "It's very, very actively being worked on. It's a no-brainer and a logical extension for Iomega."

EMC is also planning to enter the online backup space, but details of its plans are not yet available. At the vendor's quarterly financial call this month, Joseph Tucci, chairman, president and CEO of the Hopkinton, Mass.-based company, said EMC expects to launch a SaaS and storage-as-a-service offering soon.

Brian Reagan, executive vice president and chief marketing officer of Arsenal Digital, a Cary, N.C.-based provider of online backup services that has had partnerships with telcos, managed service providers and hosted service providers for years, said his company welcomes the new competitors to this space.

"We view this as positive, not only for the industry, but for users," Reagan said. "We feel the traditional hardware/software model for data protection is not the best approach for all users."