“We cannot wait for data to come to us in the cloud,” Iron Mountain Digital president Ramana Venkata told me this morning, predicting that it will be another few years yet before enterprise cloud data storage adoption picks up.

For cloud- and services-focused vendor Iron Mountain to cite slow enterprise cloud data storage adoption in its decision to buy Mimosa seems to signal an end to the wall-to-wall hype that dominated the industry discussion around the cloud last year.

Signals about this had begun to filter through in the form of two analyst reports released last month from Forrester Research and TheInfoPro that concluded enterprise data storage and IT pros are not as interested in the cloud as their vendors have been in recent months.

Taneja Group founder and consulting analyst Arun Taneja said Iron Mountain’s outlook could signal a shift to a more balanced view of cloud and on-premise data storage going forward, one that has a longer adoption timeframe than many predicted in 2009.  “Whether this is a revelation on Iron Mountain’s part that the cloud isn’t happening fast enough, I’m don’t think so,” Taneja said. “It’s more like they don’t really care – it’s clear across the industry that customers are going to need both. No broad-based supplier like this can afford to ignore that.”

According to Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Brian Babineau, ESG’s reasearch alo indicates comapnies aren’t moving to the cloud as fast as some in the industry had originally anticipated. In 2010, a soon-to-be-published ESG survey found only 17% of respondents will investigate cloud this year, Babineau said. “I don’t think we’re abandoning the cloud story, of course,” he said. “But certain applications have to evolve into the cloud, and that evolution isn’t happening as fast as some people want to see it happen.”

Iron Mountain already partners with U.K.-based Mimecast for email archiving software as a service (SaaS). That partnership is still ongoing, according to Iron Mountain. That indicates an on-premise focus for Mimosa under the otherwise services-focused Iron Mountain. “Customers wanting to archive email can now choose either NearPoint for onsite archiving or Iron Mountain’s Total Email Management Suite, powered by Mimecast technology, for archiving email in the cloud,” Iron Mountain said in its release announcing the Mimosa acquisition.

Iron Mountain claims files can be easily transferred from Mimosa on-premise archives to its Stratify Legal Discovery Service “for larger litigation matters.” The announcement also emphasizes Mimosa’s integration with files and SharePoint as well as Microsoft Exchange email.

The Mimosa team, including CEO TM Ravi, will be retained by Iron Mountain. Ravi becomes Iron Mountain Digital’s new Chief Marketing Officer.

Stay tuned to SearchStorage.com/news for more on this story.

According to Ferris’s note–

We’re hearing a series of rumors that something is going badly wrong at Dell/MessageOne. Eg:

• They’ve lost a huge amount of customer archived email over the past couple of weeks
• Many customers are making inquiries about other vendors and their ability to ingest/absorb their historic archive data
• One vendor told us they had been asked to help customers move their emails back from Dell/MessageOne and the most efficient way to ingest large amounts of data (10 TB for example)

Our industry sources confirm that there are indeed MessageOne customers making such inquiries, though the exact severity or root cause of the problem has not been established. Several sources say there has been data loss, though it’s not known how much or how many customers are affected.

One thing all our sources agree on is that over the past month or so — and especially in the last week — customers have had difficulty accessing archived email in Dell/MessageOne’s cloud, either because the data has been lost or because it has been mis-indexed. On top of that, sources say customers have been frustrated with the support they’ve received so far in response to this problem and are looking for ways to move off the service without being penalized.

UPDATE: After business hours on the East Coast last Friday, Dell responded with the following statement through a spokesperson:

Dell is committed to delivering ongoing customer satisfaction – we are aware of the issue and are in contact with the customer who has expressed concern over Dell’s service. There are many factors associated with successful email archiving including email formatting, storage management and retention policy frequency, and we are working with the customer to isolate the root cause of this issue.

Note the use of singular nouns — particularly “customer.” Earlier reports seem to indicate a widespread problem, but Dell’s statement seems to imply otherwise. We’ve asked them for further clarification, but given it’s a holiday week, aren’t sure if we’ll hear back.

UPDATE 2: Dell has responded declining further comment.

Storage Fusion Ltd, a UK company spun off by a private investment firm last year, claims to be reporting on storage environments of up to 60 PB, and signed a licensing agreement with GlassHouse Technologies last fall. According to managing director Graham Wood, the 15-person company is currently working with about 50 active customers, all with more than 50 TB, not counting “one-off” analytics done with some partners. The company was not able to provide an end user for an interview.

Storage Fusion’s product, Storage Resource Analysis (SRA), consists of a series of scripts which customers download and execute to collect data on EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, or NetApp arrays in their environment. The data generated by the scripts are then sent back to Storage Fusion’s data center, where Storage Fusion performs the analysis and provides results to the customer via the Web. According to Wood, if users get their data uploaded before 3 p.m., the analysis will be available the same day.

The company’s Web portal provides analysis according to gegraphical parameters, or the total resources, allocation and utilization at each data center location; a consumer view, which shows the hosts connected to the storage; a provider view, which normalizes the view of resources across heterogeneous storage providers into one report on the total storage environment; an environmental view, which provides energy consumption statistics according to published power and cooling specs from vendors; and an optional add-on business view, which translates storage capacity data into business-relevant statistics like dollars and cents. The reporting tool also looks for “exceptions” and provides error warnings and information on “orphan” reclaimable storage. The tool can decompose virtualization layers and supports thin provisioned arrays under its tiering tab.

Some customers, particularly large ones, might be wary of a third party peeking into their environment or sending data about their environment out of their data center. But Storage Fusion sales and operations director Peter White said “from a security perspective, our scripts are completely open — we hid nothing, and prior to running them, the user can look at them and see they’re just service log commands, the kind of command line utilities they execute all day.” The Web portal is also accessed via an SSL connection.

On the other side of the pond, and the other side of the customer-size spectrum, is Waltham, Mass.-based Aprigo, whose Ninja product has gotten several hundred free-version downloads since August. This first free version of the product collects file metadata regardless of hardware vendor on common file attributes such as name, type, size, and date modified. Aprigo compliles those attributes in a single view, and presnets them along with a cost calculator to show the dollar value of storing information on a yearly basis.

“It can be used for archiving or tiered storage business justification,” Aprigo CEO Gill Zimmerman said. Customers can also store up to 500 GB or 5 previous historical scans for trending reports. Aprigo is also working to put together a “community intelligence” report where users can compare themselves anonymously against other Aprigo customers.

Aprigo has a midmarket focus and doens’t use the term SRM because it’s reporting on file data rather than physical devices, according to Zimmerman. It’s working on a collector for other SaaS-based file systems like Google Docs. The company plans a Nov. 15 release that will also report on access control lists for file systems.

While some analysts have said the SRM space, which has seen its share of ups and downs, won’t mature until services and help for customers interpreting analytics results are more widely available, the SaaS or services-delivery model of SRM tools is not a new idea – Aptare has sold its backup and storage reporting tools to service providers for years; similarly, IBM’s Storage Enterprise Research Planner (SERP) storage resource management tools are deployed through IBM Global Services. CommVault began offering a SaaS-based backup reporting service in 2008; Dell has pledged a SaaS approach to services; and Continuity Software also offers a SaaS option for its disaster recovery change management tool.

Proofpoint email archiving appliances reside at the customer’s location, serving as a “gateway” into the cloud. The Microsoft Exchange email server journals emails to a special mailbox, which the gateway then draws from to send data to the cloud. The service integrates with the customer’s on-premise Active Directory to provide authentication and role-based access to the archive, and provides Web-based search of the archive for administrators as well as end users.

What makes Proofpoint’s approach unique, according to vice president of archiving product management Rick Dales, is that it provides search and other services without any visibility into customers’ data. When the data is ingested through the appliance, an encrypted index token is sent to Proofpoint’s data centers alongside the data. When users want to perform a search, the Proofpoint middleware makes a correlation between the index token and encrypted data, allowing it to return search results without ever decrypting the information. This is the process that was awarded a patent this week; new with this release is the ability for end users to perform these searches on their portion of the archive, rather than just IT admins.

Some of today’s updates to the service also build on these capabilities, like new support for the archiving and search of historical email, meaning email which belongs to users who have left the organization. In prior releases, if users were no longer visible in Active Directory, they would no longer be accessible through Proofpoint. With this release, Active Directory names and encrypted mailbox IDs are sent from the user’s appliance along with the encrypted index tokens. Proofpoint has no visibility into a correlation between the Active Directory names and the globally unique identifier (GUID), but can do a lookup on the plain-text name if requested by the user, including generating an address book showing all email addresses registered to that name.

“Often, lawsuits relate to people who are no longer with the organization,” said Dales.

Users can queue mail for supervisory review in environments where compliance dictates that, and the new version allows them to ‘whitelist’ emails that shouldn’t be sent to the queue, like newsletters. Similarly, updates to the Proofpoint policy engine mean users can apply policies to ‘all mail with exceptions’. Users will also now have the option of retaining data indefinitely, rather than having to decide on a retention period up front. The software also now supports archiving instant messages in addition to email. Finally, a new active legal hold feature flags new mail for archive that may be relevant to existing cases.

The announcement may be among signs that email archiving SaaS offerings, which one analyst described as “not ready for prime time” in the enterprise last year, are beginning to catch up with on-premise products, according to ESG’s Babineau. “They might not be able to catch up fully, because there are some inherent limitations to the cloud environment,” he said. “But the operational benefits that they deliver, i.e., they don’t require any IT ops management and you don’t have to buy any storage, make them a viable alternative to on-premise solutions, especially in this economy.”

Carbonite CEO David Friend in his Boston-area office

“Do-it-yourself” infrastructure is a competitive differentiator among providers of storage services, I’ve learned in conversations with providers over the last two weeks. While not every Web 2.0 service is storage-focused, these discussions make me wonder what the results will be for third-party storage vendors looking to supply prepackaged configurations to service-provider data centers.

Following Carbonite’s lawsuit against its former storage supplier, its competitors such as SpiderOak have pounced on the opportunity to tout their own internal infrastructures in an attempt to lure worried Carbonite customers.

SpiderOak CEO Ethan Oberman told me that SpiderOak assembles its own storage systems out of commodity servers and disk drives, purchasing individual components and assembling them under the company’s proprietary storage clustering software. “We don’t rely on a third party pre-assembled storage system” as Carbonite did with Promise, Oberman said.

Shortly after I posted about Oberman’s statements, Carbonite CEO David Friend invited me to see Carbonite’s infrastructure. I took him up on that last Friday, and it turns out Carbonite’s setup isn’t much different from what SpiderOak described.

The current Carbonite infrastructure – sets of 15 one-terabyte
SATA drives packed into racks of custom Dell equipment

Carbonite has between 10 PB and 12 PB of storage in two data centers in the Boston area. While the vendor is suing Promise for products it deployed several years ago, Carbonite has already completely changed out the Promise storage in favor of a self-integrated system of Dell PowerEdge MD1000 and MD3000 servers packed with 15 one-terabyte SATA disks, configured for RAID 6. Four of these units are attached to each server node that runs the company’s internally written parallel file system.

Carbonite infrastructure detail

SpiderOak’s Oberman said his company assembles the disk drives and RAID controllers internally. Friend said he’s still content to let a third-party vendor assemble the RAID arrays despite the experience with Promise.

“The software is what we worry about,” he said. Promise’s arrays had firmware bugs, he said, something that might not have changed if Carbonite had done more of the hardware assembly. “Even if you buy a disk drive from somewhere, it has firmware in it – we’re not going to get into that kind of stuff,” Friend said.

Carbonite chose Dell to replace Promise based on a discounted price and its willingness to work with Carbonite to design a customized hardware system, according to Friend.

The more I talk to online storage service providers, the more there seems to be a disconnect between what they’re deploying and what storage vendors are marketing in an effort to reach Web 2.0 shops. While new “cloud” storage systems such as EMC’s Atmos and HP’s ExDS are built on industry-standard hardware components, the vendors also supply software to tie those components together.

Friend said he’s learned that a fully prepackged software-hardware system from a third-party vendor won’t fit his business. “Every piece of software we’ve bought along the way has broken,” he said.

But this also may be because Carbonite is an outlier in terms of its workload. “There aren’t a lot of 10 petabyte data centers out there,” Friend said. He estimated some 95% of the processing time in Carbonite’s data center is spent on write, rather than read operations. “There [also] aren’t a lot of data centers out there that are ‘mostly write,’” he added.

Carbonite also designed its parallelized distributed file system to treat data in its data center and on users’ PCs as part of one big geographically distributed pool. Friend claims this is a differentiator, providing speedier restores to users than competitors such as Mozy can do by reassmbling files before restoring data.

For those reasons, Friend said he doesn’t anticipate that online services focused primarily on storing customer data will be fertile ground for existing storage vendors. This hasn’t stopped third-party storage vendors from making regular sales calls to Carbonite’s data center, according to senior director of operations Kai Gray. Gray said he listens to most of the pitches, but he echoed Friend on the issues with prepackaged software, and said the cost comparison equation has yet to change.

“By the time [a storage vendor] puts stuff together and marks it up, it’s too expensive,” he said. Storage product competition in this data center is at the disk-drive level rather than systems. “We’re eagerly awaiting two terabyte disk drive shipments,” Gray said. Right now Carbonite has mostly Western Digital disk drives deployed, but “we are very drive agnostic.”

While Carbonite has yet to go for a third-party “cloud” storage system, Friend also points out it’s a different animal from many other Web 2.0 companies. “Most data centers are a cost center, not the business itself,” he said. “This is our factory – everything has to be customized because it’s a competitive advantage. It’s worth it to spend money designing our own file system, but if you’re, say, Fidelity, you don’t want to do that.”

Carbonite CEO David Friend and director of operations Kai Gray in one of Carbonite’s Boston-area data centers

Digital archiving the next frontier?

The data center I saw was very impressive – it’s in one of the newest facilities in the Boston area, complete with ultrasonic humidifiers and state-of-the-art security. But it’s not too far from Carbonite’s other data center, bringing to mind what ESG founder and blogger Steve Duplessie wrote after Carbonite announced the Promise lawsuit. The analyst cautioned that enterprise users should ask online backup services about things like SLAs and geographic redundancy to distinguish between consumer/prosumer and enterprise services before signing over their backups.

I asked Friend about this. Carbonite sees itself as a consumer/prosumer offering, he said, and does not offer SLAs or redundancy outside the Boston area. “Because we’re offering a backup service, there’s already geographic redundancy between the user’s PC and our data center,” he said. “No one [in our market] seems to want to pay double for a backup of a backup.”

However, “if we get into archiving, where we might have the only copy of a document, geographic redundancy would come into play,” he said. Is Carbonite planning that move? “We’re thinking about it,” he said. “It would be a logical product line extension.”

When Carbonite backup SaaS rival SpiderOak came along with a pitch for me about how they’re a) more reliable and secure than Carbonite and b) welcoming Carbonite customers with a 20% discount on a year’s service for switching, I decided to try out those questions on them. What followed was an interesting discussion.

SpiderOak CEO Ethan Oberman says SpiderOak, unlike Carbonite, assembles its own storage systems out of commodity servers and disk drives, purchasing individual components and assembling them under the company’s proprietary storage clustering software. “We don’t rely on a third party pre-assembled storage system” as Carbonite did with Promise, Oberman said. But does putting together its own storage systems make SpiderOak’s more reliable? Not necessarily.

(Side note: SpikerOak isn’t alone here. Whale many storage vendors are betting on their future by selling pre-built systems to cloud service providers, the pitch I hear from those service providers is that their service is more reliable/ more secure / better performing because they built it themselves.)

So if we take the claim that home-built is better at face value, let’s say I was a Carbonite user who lost data, and now I’m looking to switch providers. Assuming I haven’t been totally turned off on the idea of SaaS in general, I think I’d still like to see something definitive in writing from my new prospective vendor, regardless of that vendor’s data center architecture, about data loss and what it’s prepared to offer me on that front.

It took quite a while before our conversation today progressed to the point where we could concede that although data loss is highly, highly, highly unlikely, it theoretically can happen. One of the reasons SpiderOak doesn’t address that possibility outright is because it doesn’t want that possibility in users’ minds. “We take this very, very seriously,” Oberman said. “Losing customer data in this market basically means going out of business.”

But as Duplessie put it, “I know things break. What I don’t know is how often they break, or why, and most importantly – what you do about it.”

Oberman said SpiderOak would probably do the right thing and give consumers their money back in the event of their data being lost. “It’s just ethical business practices,” he said. “We stand behind our product.”

Would he put that in writing?

Well, that opened up another can of worms. SpiderOak, Carbonite, and other consumer-grade backup SaaS vendors don’t offer SLAs or even formal written guarantees about data loss, in part, Oberman said, because of a fear of predatory lawsuits in the consumer world. Why these are more prevalent among consumers than among businesses remains unclear to me, but SpikerOak claims that’s what its legal counsel says. Also, it’s not as easy to assign a value to consumer data vs. corporate data attached to billable hours in order to institute hard financial penalties, and SLAs make the whole service more expensive, Oberman claimed.

For its consumer/SOHO service, SpiderOak’s focus is on cost–it charges about $5 to $10 per month. “Those are pretty cheap numbers–so cheap, in fact, that we can’t offer geographic redundancy economically,” he said. To provide SLA-worthy redundancy, the cost of the service would have to go up. This is something SpiderOak is planning to do by this summer with the launch of a new enterprise-focused backup service, which will be about four times more expensive as the current offering.

In the meantime, Oberman suggested that users attracted to the cost but concerned with the reliability of consumer/SOHO services could theoretically treat them like some companies do internet service providers (ISPs), and deploy two or three of the cheaper services for DIY redundancy.  “There does seem to be a gap” between expensive fully-redundant enterprise services and cheaper but less resilient consumer/SOHO services in the market right now, he added.

According to the notice, those who store their photos on Kodak’s online galleries will have to purchase paper prints of at least some of their photos each year to keep their data online.

The notice reads:

We wanted to make you aware that we have modified our Terms of Service: To more effectively serve our Gallery members, we have adjusted our photo-storage policy to align with storage usage.

How this affects you.

Once you begin storing photos at the Gallery, you must make the following purchases to continue such storage:

• Members with photo storage of 2 gigabytes (GB) or less must make annual minimum purchases totaling at least $4.99.

• Members with photo storage exceeding 2GB must make annual minimum purchases totaling at least $19.99.

Failure to meet this requirement may result in your photos being deleted from the Gallery.

You are currently compliant with our new policy, so no immediate action is required on your part.

Once you’ve uploaded photos, please refer to your Storage Status within the My Account page of the Gallery website to see the time frame within which you are required to make your next qualifying purchase to meet our Storage Policy requirements.**

We look forward to continuing our relationship with you.

The KODAK Gallery

Maybe it’s just me, but it was jarring to read this in the midst of the other news I’ve been immersed in, such as the proliferation of online services for sharing and storing files like photos, and the death of print media across the country. Kodak’s definitely going against the grain. Why is a company that has an online storage service trying to force its users back into dead-tree-based “file sharing” (at least part of the time)?

It’s one thing to charge for online storage if the free-upload business model becomes less than sustainable. It’s another thing to try to make people pay for unwanted paper photos when what they want to do is store digital photos. Why not just charge customers for online space? Then Kodak can make money, and customers get what they want — a way to store and share digital pictrures.

I expct this will prompt users to leave Kodak EasyShare. There are just too many online-only alternatives these days. Just like the whole point of SaaS for business applications is not having to maintain an internal infrastructure, the whole idea of online photo sharing–to me, anyway–is *not* having to find a place to display or store paper copies of photos.

I sent Kodak a few questions about this notice today, but didn’t hear back.

That’s the trouble in this wild and wooly world of the cloud–especially in its early days. Not every service is going to make it, and then you’re going to have to figure out what to do with your data if your service fails.

Hewlett-Packard pulled the plug on HP Upline, and according to our Australian affiliate, ma.gnolia went under. SearchStorage ANZ reports that “in late January, ma.gnolia experienced a catastrophic data loss event and turned to backups to restore its database of users’ bookmarks. Both the primary and secondary backups failed irrevocably.”

Said a friend of mine who’s a Digg addict (I’m more a del.icio.us woman myself), “Losing my bookmarks would *hurt*.”

In the case of HP’s Upline online backup service, users will at least be able to get their data back. HP confirmed this afternoon will be discontinued as of March 31. In a statement, an HP spokesperson said:

HP continually evaluates product lines and has decided to discontinue the HP Upline service on March 31, 2009.

HP will no longer be backing up customer files to the HP Upline servers as of Feb 26, 2009 at 8 am Pacific time. HP will keep the file restore feature of the Upline service operational through March 31, 2009 Pacific time in order for customers to download any files that have been backed up to Upline.

Blogger AppScout wrote disappointedly, “And so goes the story of one of the slickest online storage and backup services to launch in the past year.” Among Upline’s unique features was the ability for users to tag content for later search and share, and to publish files online using the service through a feature called the Upline Library. However, Upline crashed right out of the gate, drawing opportunistic marketing for competitors.

The reviews, written in December 2006, were first brought to the attention of the New York Times by a Carbonite customer identifying himself as Bruce Goldensteinberg, who has also posted screenshots of the original reviews on a Picasa blog.

Carbonite has posted an official response to the issue on its website, claiming policies were not in place at the time but have since been updated. Carbonite CEO David Friend has also responded directly to Pogue’s blog with a claim that Carbonite’s uppermost management was not aware of the bogus postings until they were brought to public attention.

This is where things really get interesting–Pogue also disputes that claim, referring to the comments section of another post about Carbonite where one of the first comments discusses the bogus reviews. David Friend posts comment #29 on that same thread, leading Pogue to argue that Carbonite was aware of the reviews at least since September and is only “cleaning up its act—now, after it’s been caught.”

I followed up with Carbonite myself about this, and received this response from a spokesperson:

In 2006 a few reviews were posted by employees who did not disclose their employment affiliation. That was a mistake and we apologize. This has long since ceased and will not happen again.

Pogue’s post also can be seen as responding to this pre-emptively:

It doesn’t matter to me that Carbonite’s fraudulent reviews are a couple of years old. These people are gaming the system, deceiving the public to enrich themselves.

In Carbonite’s defense, I do think the level of recrimination they’re getting is a bit disproportionate to the problem of the reviews. Mr. Goldensteinberg became disgruntled when he experienced a crash, difficult restore, and delayed customer support. That’s a more important core issue for an online backup company than marketing tricks that are not unique {Pogue’s blog points out a more recent similar incident involving Belkin).

Slow restores may also be the way of online backup, especially if users are looking to restore an entire system, at this stage of its development. EMC Corp.’s Mozy was hit with similar angst among its users last year over similar problems–it, too, was forced to revise its up-front disclosures to users about restore times.

Bottom line: the Internet is all about word of mouth, but doing business oftentimes can’t be. Forget about Amazon reviews, and make sure you get an SLA from your online backup service provider in writing before you deploy the service.