Operating under the brand name Mozy, Berkeley has very high profile in the market for home and business backup services. It began it first beta service only 18 months ago. But it already claims to be the word’s largest provider of what are specific backup rather services, with around 300,000 buyers of its MozyHome service, and another 8,000 users of its business-oriented MozyPro service.
Most of Berkeley Data Systems’ business customers are small companies, but Berkeley’s star customer is the colossal General Electric, which has signed a deal involving the backup of 300,000 GE laptop and desktop PCs.
Like EMC, Berkeley is declining to comment on the rumors of a potential deal, which began with a report on the blog TechCrunch that said that EMC has paid $76m for Berkeley Data Systems. That would make an excellent return on the $1.9m of venture capital raised so far by Berkeley Data System, which is located just outside of Salt Lake City, Utah.
In April this year EMC’s CEO Joe Tucci said that the storage giant would soon be launching itself into online services, including but not necessarily restricted to backup.
Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Bob Laliberte said: Buying Mozy would make a lot of sense for EMC. They’re a pretty impressive company and they’d give EMC a really strong presence in the consumer and SMB market. And they’d bring EMC to market quickly.
EMC is far from unique in heading for the online backup hills. IBM, HP and Iron Mountain already offer online backup services, and Symantec was scheduled to begin doing so this summer. We’re still on track, a spokesperson for Symantec said yesterday.
A number of factors have recently combined to make online backup services appeal to smaller businesses, and to larger businesses running multiple remote offices. These include the increasing sensitivity to data loss, heavier workload completing backups for ever increasing data volumes.
There’s a tremendous benefit to SMBs that sometimes might even have only one IT guy, who until now has had to remember to put the backup tape into the trunk of his car every night. The services are automatic, and they provide near continuous data protection, with much lower RTO [recovery time objective and closer RPO [recovery point objective], Laliberte said.
While the consumer service cost $4.95 per month for unlimited backups, the business-tailored service that adds features such as near-CDP and bandwidth throttling costs $3.95 per month per machine, plus $0.50 per GB of data. Both services involve client software that automatically sends backup data to Berkeley.
EMC has only very limited experience selling into the very low-end of the market. It’s going to be interesting to see this would get incorporated into EMC’s business, and how it would be sold, Laliberte said.
Berkeley Data Systems claims that the low cost of its home-grown back-end storage system is ensuring healthy margins for its business.
The company gives the credit for its system to its CEO Josh Coates, who also founded the now defunct storage service provider Scale8. Mozy claims that Coates developed what was then the world’s largest online storage at Scale8, before moving on to work with the non-profit organization the Internet Archive, which was aiming to archive all human knowledge.
The system now in use at Berkeley’s two Utah data centers is storing 3PB of data. It applies a Reed-Solomon encoding algorithm to provide data protection with much lower overheads than conventional RAID striping, Berkeley said.
According to TechCrunch, Google was rumored to have been negotiating to buy Berkeley last year.
Berkeley’s claim to be the largest provider of online backup services is based specifically on backup services, as distinct from services provided by companies such as Xdrive, a Berkeley spokesperson said.
