EMC serves up new pricing for Mozy

The Mozy online backup service has gotten considerably more expensive since EMC acquired it from Berkley Data Systems.

After buying Berkeley Data Systems for $76 million last October, EMC placed Mozy into its EMC Fortress group of services, expanded the product line to include an enterprise version and split its MozyPro for small businesses into two levels: desktop and server. But new customers must pay a heavy premium for their server backups.

In an email to customers, EMC said its MozyPro desktop service retain its price of $3.95 per license and 50 cents per GB while MozyPro server costs $6.95 per license and $1.75  per GB per month. That means a one-server license with 10 GB of storage that would cost $8.95 under the old model will be $24.95 under the new model. A 20-server license with 500 GB goes from $329 to $1,014.

Before EMC acquired Mozy, MozyPro included server backup in its single tier. It added features such as support for Microsoft Windows server OS, and VSS writer backup and restore to Exchange, SYSVOL and Active Directory to its server tier, but customers will pay a stiff price.

MozyPro customer Jason Powell, IT director at Granger (Indiana) Community Church, wrote about the price increase on his blog, concluding: “An approx (sic) quadrupling in price seems ridiculous to me, but what do I know?”

Roy Sanford, vice president of EMC Fortress, defended the price increase by saying it affects only one Mozy service and EMC is grandfathering the price for licenses purchased before March 1. “There’s nothing surreptitious going on here,” Sanford said in a statement emailed to SearchStorage.com. “We’re not trying to institute enterprise pricing across the board. The price changes that were announced to customers affects only one out of five Mozy offers and certainly can’t be misconstrued as a price change across the board.”

EMC also offers a Mozy Enterprise service that was not available from Berkeley Data Systems. The Enterprise service costs $5.25 per month per desktop or laptop plus 70 cents per GB, and $9.25 per Windows Server plus $2.35 per GB protected per month.

Ridiculous pricing or not, Powell is considering an upgrade to Enterprise edition because it lets customers seed a 2 TB USB drive from EMC for their first backup instead of uploading data online.

“Guess I’ll be making some calls to Mozy this week and see what makes the most sense for GCC,” he wrote on his blog.

He may be getting calls from Mozy competitors. Online backup vendor Intronis Technologies already launched a Mozy Migration Plan to induce customers to switch. Intronis says it will charge no license fees for Mozy customers who switch.