VMware 'buys' Mozy for its cloudy goodness

Will operate it for EMC

EMC has transferred its Mozy online backup service, assets and staff to VMware, signalling VMWare's intent to be far more visible as a cloud IT service provider.

There is no mention of any acquisition or transfer fee, which might seem odd. Surely Mozy has a value as a business and surely EMC's market worth will be diminished by the transfer of Mozy to is majority-owned VMware subsidiary? Mozy COO Charlotte Yarkoni, said: "In fact EMC retains the Mozy business as it has been delivering it for over four years now. An operational support agreement between EMC and VMware is in place to make this possible and ensure no impact to Mozy customers."

VMware chief technology officer Steve Herrod said in a blog that "VMware will operate the Mozy service on behalf of EMC without interruption".

The acquired assets include a worldwide data centre network with more than 1 million users and 70PB of stored data. Herrod says: "Mozy has taken the base technology that keeps you from losing your data and turned it into a scalable, fail-safe way of building out a collection of highly-automated datacentres with strong security and 24/7 operations fronted by elegant, user interfaces across many client types. This is the foundational architecture for the many cloud-based services being delivered today."

He says Mozy will help VMware to better serve the small/medium business market which, he claims is moving rapidly to the cloud: "We'll make sure that these customers have easy access to the Mozy back-up service as well as other related data services to come... The Mozy future roadmap is going to excite consumers and businesses alike, and we also see the opportunity to leverage Mozy's data compression, synchronisation, client integration, and analytic tools to extend several existing and not-yet-announced VMware products."

Yarkoni said: "Staff from both companies will begin to integrate longer-term development plans central to building and delivering hybrid cloud solutions... [Customers] can also expect greater interoperability between Mozy and VMware environments, and complementary end user and server-related services."

VMware becomes EMC's cloud service delivery business. Why? Is VMware EMC's chosen vehicle to take on Amazon, Azure and Google in offering mass-market – well, SMB Market – and cloud IT services? Is VMware going to include Mozy data protection functionality within ESX for use by virtual machines?

Will a private cloud operator be able to use such functionality to protect distributed user's data in a central location or out in the (VMware-delivered) public cloud? What does this mean for existing backup software providers?

Questions, questions and more questions. It looks as if VMware, with Mozy, could represent a thumping great threat to backup software and service providers for apps in virtual machines. ®