Dig into Iron Mountain and you'll find Seagate and EVault

Cloudy DR dares to enter underground data dungeons

Cloud-based backup, recovery and disaster recovery (DR) services are being offered from an Iron Mountain data dungeon using Seagate kit and EVault software.

Seagate is helping Iron Mountain move into the digital storage business again. Autonomy, in pre-HP days, bought the rusty heap's cloud archive storage business in 2011 after Iron Mountain threw in the towel on a failed enterprise, prompted by activist investor Elliott Management.

Now, three years later, it is partnering with Seagate to get back into the cloud storage business. Iron Mountain will offer EVault's Cloud Backup and Cloud Disaster Recovery services. The deal involves:

• Seagate locating parts of its data centre operations to Iron Mountain’s National Underground Data Centre.
• Iron Mountain reselling Seagate EVault Cloud Server Backup and Cloud Disaster Recovery offerings.

The underground location sounds like a data centre dungeon, being located 220 feet below ground in a massive 145-plus acre former limestone mine. Now that's secure.

Customers will be able, the two firms say, to protect servers with continuous backup and get recovery services through various SLAs (service-level agreements); one hour, 24 hours, and 48 hours. Two days' recovery time sounds a long time. What's that about?

Well, it's for file recovery from corrupted disks, not restoration from a backup. Customers with bum drives either use Seagate/EVault software themselves or Seagate techs work on the disk. This is an area Kroll Ontrack specialises in.

For server data backup and restore there is an on-site appliance with replication to the data centre dungeon.

Iron mountain says: "Your data is de-duplicated, compressed, encrypted, and then transmitted to one of our secure data centres. You monitor and manage everything within a web browser, giving you access at your fingertips 24/7. Recovery is just as easy. Simply navigate to the recovery point via our intuitive interface, and click."

Large scale recoveries can involve Iron Mountain shipping you an appliance loaded with your data. ®