Iron Mountain Makes Email Move

Iron Mountain will unveil a managed service for email at the Cebit show Monday, part of a major overhaul of its strategy for handling digital data.

Digital archiving has been something of a sore spot for Iron Mountain. (See Iron Mountain Marches On.) Last week, the vendor admitted that this part of its business is losing money, and it described some of the technology challenges it has faced developing its archive systems. (See Iron Mountain Reports Q4.)

The vendor is now pinning its hopes on managed email and a mysterious storage grid code-named "Bedrock" in an attempt to turn its fortunes around.

The managed service, called Active Archiving for Email, is a rebranding of MessageOne's EMS Archive offering, and it uses a software agent in Outlook to connect end users to MessageOne data centers. (See Energizing Exchange.)

CIOs and IT managers can set their own policies for archiving emails, says Sean Hegarty, product manager for Iron Mountain's digital archive. This could involve, for example, archiving any emails that are larger than 1 Mbyte or more than 30 days old, he says.The software agent also sets up a search bar within Outlook which lets users scan the managed archive when they need to get this data back.

At least one analyst feels that there is growing demand for managed email services, despite some users voicing their concern about the technology. (See Intel's Email Maelstrom, Outsourcing Email Not an Easy Choice and Email Gets More Outsourced Options.) "Because you don't have to deploy it in-house, you can get it up and running much more quickly," says Brian Babineau of the Enterprise Strategy Group, adding that managed services also reduce the operational costs of email systems.

Monday's announcement is not the first email service offered by Iron Mountain. (See Iron Mountain Scales Email .) The vendor already has an offering aimed at U.S. firms looking to meet SEC regulations for data retention, although this stores copies of the emails, rather than the emails itself.

Active Archiving for Email, which is also available in Europe, shifts the actual emails to MessageOne's data centers. Hegarty says that this will helps limit the amount of hardware in users' data centers. "We're drastically reducing the footprint of these local message servers."

Active Archiving is priced at $4 per user and $5 per Gbyte per month, although Hegarty says that discounts are available if users buy storage capacity in advance.Iron Mountain is not the only vendor playing in this space, and rival Zantaz told Byte and Switch that its own base pricing is in a similar range, adding that volume discounts are also available based on the amount of storage used.

At this stage, Iron Mountain is keeping details of its beta customers close to its chest, although Hegarty told Byte and Switch that the firm is handling Tbytes of data for "several" customers.

The exec was a little more forthcoming on the topic of Bedrock, a storage grid to underpin Iron Mountain's digital archiving efforts. "It will be very scalable, very cheap -- there will be dynamic replication and WORM-type storage."

Active Archiving will eventually be plugged into Bedrock, as will Iron Mountain's LiveVault and Connected offerings. The exec even hinted that Bedrock could reduce the cost of email archiving, although he did not reveal specifics. "I would expect that this would be more of a 2008 or 2009 solution."

While Iron Mountain has its sights focused on structured data, Kazeon will be unveiling a consulting service geared toward unstructured data on Monday. (See The Ongoing Search and Kazeon Reduces Cost of E-Discovery.)The Data Assessment Service scans the likes of Word documents, JPEGs, and PowerPoint files, and checks for "stale" data -- files that have not been accessed or modified for six months or more. Based on results from 37 early adopters, Kazeon estimates that as much as 48 percent of unstructured data falls into this category. "These [files] are typically very good candidates to be archived," says Mike Marchi, vice president of solutions marketing at Kazeon.

The service involves Kazeon hooking its IS1200 indexing device to a customer's network and scanning files based on factors such as file age and size. Pricing for the Data Assessment Service, available now, starts at $10,000 for an initial 4 Tbytes, with each additional Tbyte costing $1,000.

James Rogers, Senior Editor Byte and Switch