Here’s unusual news in this era of exploding data stores: A major player is shutting down, not expanding, some of its cloud storage services.
Iron Mountain Digital, which got into the cloud storage race late in 2009, told eWEEK April 11 that it is "retiring" its commodity-type public storage services, Virtual File Store and Archive Service Platform.
The company is planning to phase completely out of the basic online storage business by 2013, making IMD the first major player in cloud storage to pull out of the sector.
Iron Mountain Digital, however, is not closing down all its cloud storage services. Rather than compete in a tough race with companies such as Amazon S3, Google, EMC Mozy, Carbonite, CommVault and others to sell basic online storage space, the Boston-based company will be focusing instead on specialized services around storage, such as intellectual property management and e-discovery for legal purposes.
"Iron Mountain did recently notify customers of our Virtual File Store and Archive Service Platform that we are retiring these two commodity cloud-storage solutions," an Iron Mountain spokewoman told eWEEK via email on April 11.
"This decision only affects those using Virtual File Store, a low-cost cloud storage option for inactive files, and technology partners who use the Archive Service Platform as a general purpose cloud for storing their customers’ data."
For more, read the eWEEK article: Iron Mountain Digital Phasing Out Basic Cloud Storage.