Iron Mountain’s Natural Cooling Advantage

With a growing number of providers building underground data bunkers, a leading name in data storage is entering the game in a more substantial fashion. Iron Mountain, which has been a market leader in storage of documents and backup tapes, is beginning to lease data center space in its huge facility located 220 feet underground in a limestone cave outside Pittsburgh.

CIO recently reported that Marriott will become the largest private customer operating a data center in Iron Mountain’s 145-acre facility, which has its own fire company, water treatment plant and 24-hour security and maintenance force. Marriott is leasing 12,500 square feet of data center space from Iron Mountain for a disaster recovery “hot site.” Here’s some additional background:

The company calculated that the 10-year cost of colocating a new data center at Iron Mountain’s underground facility would be cost neutral compared to its existing agreement for disaster recovery, according to a spokesperson. Plus, the opportunity to improve energy efficiency would bring significant savings and help the company to achieve its environmental goals.

Those savings were driven by the cooling advantages of an underground facility, where the cooler temperature allows tenants to spend save money on air conditioning.

Mozy Cloud Storage Gains With Businesses

In another sign of the potential for online storage, EMC said this week that its cloud storage service Mozy Inc. has doubled the size of its enterprise and small to medium-size business customer base during the first half of 2008. Mozy now has more than 750,000 users and 20,000 business customers backing up 7.6 billion files to its 10-petabyte storage system, according to EMC.

Mozy’s growing traction with business users may be helped by a deal in which its services will be marketed to customers of the huge office supply retail chain Staples. The service, called Staples Network Services, will be offered through Thrive Networks, a subsidiary of Staples.

HP Upline Storage Service Still Down

HP is working to resolve technical problems that forced it to suspend its new online storage service, HP Upline, just 10 days after its launch. HP spokesperson Sheila Watson told Network World that the company is investigating an “isolated technical issue” and the service could return this week. HP Upline launched April 7, but began experiencing outages last week. On Friday users received this notice from HP:

On Thursday, April 17th, HP suspended operation of the HP Upline Service. We fully anticipate that suspension of the Upline Service will be temporary and short in duration, and will notify you when the Upline Service is operational again. … If you are not a resident of the United States, we regretfully must inform you that the initial launch of the HP Upline Service was intended for United States residents only. Unfortunately, our filtering tools did not adequately screen for subscribers residing outside of the United States.

U.S. residents will be able to resume using the service once it reopens, while non-U.S. accounts are being deleted. The Upline service launched to generally positive reviews from tech media, including PC Magazine and ArsTechnica.

Savvis Expands Utility Storage Offerings

Savvis, Inc. (SVVS) has expanded its utility storage services, adding a storage offering for less-frequently accessed data that will be more affordable than its current storage services. Utility Storage quality-of-service 4 (QoS 4) targets lower tier persistent data, which Savvis says is one of the fastest growing segments of the storage market. The company also announced NAS Connect (Network Attached Storage Connect) and Utility Backup NAS as options for customers who use NAS as well as storage area network (SAN) storage.

“Savvis’ expansion of its Utility Storage Services portfolio and the introduction of NAS Connect respond to increasing customer requests and growing market demand identified for flexible and scalable utility storage services,” said James Whitemore, Chief Marketing Officer for Savvis.

Mountains West Buys Bunker Storage Firm

Can a mining holding company strike it rich developing former military ammunition bunkers as ultra-secure storage? That’s the strategy being pursued by Mountains West Exploration Inc. (MXWI), which has entered the data center business with the acquisition of Secured Digital Storage LLC in an all stock deal.

Secured Digital Storage (SDS) provides secure high-capacity storage to enterprises, healthcare facilities and government agencies. The company says it has developed a “Bunker Power” process for converting decommissioned ammo bunkers into energy-efficient data center space.

Mountains West was formed in 1979 to develop coal bed methane leases in Colorado. It is publicly traded on the Over the Counter Bulletin Board Exchange, but hadn’t had any business activity prior to its September announcement that it intended to acquire SDS, and still doesn’t have a company web site. On Oct. 4 the company announced plans to acquire Net Direct Systems LLC, an IT systems integrator with $30 million in annual revenues. That prompted shares of MXWI, which had been trading for 37 cents, to surge to more than $10 a share. It has since settled in a range of $4 to $5 a share.

SoftLayer Expands Storage Offerings

Storage and backup solutions are a growing focus for some of the country’s largest hosting providers. An example is SoftLayer, which has rolled out three new storage and disaster recovery offerings in recent weeks. Last week the Dallas company unveiled EVault, an enterprise-class backup solution from Seagate Technology that provides automated, disk-to-disk backup.

EVault will be integrated into StorageLayer, a storage and backup service launched Oct. 15 that features File Transfer Protocol (FTP), Network Attached Storage (NAS) and iSCSI technologies. SoftLayer says all three services are fully automated and can be provisioned at-will through SoftLayer’s customer portal and API. While FTP and NAS provide fast, reliable and cost-effective storage for maximum data retention, iSCSI offers a low-cost alternative to traditional fiber-channel storage solutions. It allows access to enterprise-grade Storage Area Network (SAN) storage over Ethernet, and is easily provisioned and highly scalable. One sign of interest in iSCSI is today’s announcement that Dell will acquire EqualLogic for $1.4 billion. IDC projects that the iSCSI SAN market is expected to grow from about $600 million in 2006 to $6 billion in the next five years.

Wordpress.com Shifts Storage to Amazon S3

WordPress.com, the hosted blogging service operated by the founders of the open source WordPress blogging/CMS system, recently moved all its storage to Amazon’s S3 utility storage system, according to founder Matt Mullenweg. WordPress.com has had a lower profile than some other blogging services, but Mullenweg says some metrics now show the service is getting more than 300 million page views and 70 million unique visitors each month.

“We’re now using S3 as the primary storage for WordPress.com, rather than just for backups,” wrote Mullenweg. But unlike photo hub SmugMug, which says it S3 helped it save more than $1 million over 12 months, Mullenweg says the primary benefit isn’t financial. “Our AWS bill went from around $200/mo to $1500/mo, and rising,” he writes. “It has simplified some of our requirements, but doesn’t look like it’ll save any money.”

Mullenweg also said Amazon’s decision to introduce a Service Level Agreement didn’t factor into the decision. “Big companies like (SLAs), but in the real world I’ve found there to be a low correlation with service reliability and the presence of a SLA.”

All The Wood Behind A Single Blog Post

Jonathan Schwartz wanted the attention of the tech blogosphere, or at least the Sun faithful. In choosing the title of yesterday’s blog post - All The Wood Behind One Arrow - Schwartz invoked a phrase with a long history at Sun Microsystems, where it was regularly used by his predecessor as CEO, Scott McNealy.

So what’s the focus of all this focus? Storage, as it turns out. “I’m radically increasing Sun’s focus on storage today,” Schwartz writes. “Why? Because the market’s only going to grow, for as long as we’re on this earth, and I believe our talent and assets give us a big sustainable advantage - that we’re planning on exploiting. Aggressively.” An excerpt:

I’m going to be combining our Storage and Server product teams to create a new converged group at Sun known simply as our “Systems” team. The Systems team will focus on the evolution and convergence of computing, storage and networking systems. Talk to any datacenter adminstrator, and that’s what they want to hear - they live in a world managing the (often idiosyncratic) interactions of that trinity (computing, storage and networking - and just wait until they’re virtualized). We want to be in a position to innovate on their behalf, at the system level, beyond the boxes - across blades, racks, disk and tape.

Hmmmm … does that mean all the wood isn’t behind Project Blackbox? Read the full entry for more details.