VMWare picks up Mozy cloud storage offerings

VMware is now running the cloud-based data protection service Mozy, another EMC-owned company, hiring on the team and overseeing and operating all of the assets. The company will continue to operate Mozy service without interruption, it says.

Mozy has more than 1 million users, 70,000 business customers and a global network of data centers. In a blog post, VMWare CTO Steve Herrod addressed the scale of Mozy and what it adds to VMWare’s quivers as drivers behind the acquisition.

Over the past 5 years, Mozy has built one of the best examples of a globally distributed, large-scale cloud offering … By being directly engaged with the delivery of such a service, VMware will further ramp our own cloud-related learning and accelerate new IP, scale, and capabilities into the products that we provide to our customers and public cloud partners … 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 datacenters 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.

The rationale for the shift is clear: The type of service Mozy offers will shore up VMware’s efforts to hit the small business sector with cloud-based offerings. In making the announcement, the company cited its VMWare Go offering, which is aimed at businesses with little or no IT staff.

In her own blog post, Mozy COO Charlotte Yarkoni commented on how seamless the shift will be for enterprise customers:

We’ve developed a strong partnership with VMware and over these past several months it has become increasingly clear that moving to VMware will allow us to take advantage of and extend the synergies we’ve been building between the companies.   VMware and Mozy share a vision for how cloud computing will transform IT and help businesses achieve greater agility.  By joining forces, we believe we can accelerate the development of offerings that businesses are looking for.