Cirtas last week took a bump and laid off most of its staff, saying there were operational problems with its Cirtas BlueJet Controller that needed to be retooled for extensibility. The startup, which has received $32.5 million in funding, is the latest company to pull out of the crowded cloud storage arena.
Recently, Iron Mountain indicated it would suspend its Virtual File Store and Archive Service platform without giving a reason. After weeks of rumors that Iron Mountain would close these services to customers, the company will continue to support some cloud storage services as it seeks to migrate them to another cloud service provider. Virtual File Store customers have the option to migrate, get their data back or be shifted to the more expensive Iron Mountain File System Archiving service. For Archive Service Platform customers there is no option; their data will be returned and their contracts terminated or they will be migrated to another provider.
This move on Iron Mountain’s part is the third in the evolving cloud storage space. VaultScape folded in 2010, and EMC shifted its attention from providing cloud storage services to a model whereby its partners – AT&T Synaptic SaaS among them – would offer the service themselves, thereby cutting EMC’s competition with its channel and allowing it to focus on its Atmos cloud infrastructure platform.
Already, companies such as Nirvanix and Zetta have jumped on opportunities in Iron Mountains’ exit from cloud storage. Nirvanix has offered to migrate Iron Mountain customers for free and offer them 30 days of unlimited free storage.
Druva last week expressed its faith in cloud storage with the launch of Druva inSync Cloud, an automated backup solution which backs up data from laptop computers to the cloud. Druva inSync Cloud offers multiple near-continuous restore points and uses application-aware deduplication to reduce the amount of data being stored in the cloud. The software also deploys WAN optimization techniques to speed data transfer into the cloud. Data is encrypted in flight as well as at rest. The software is available now starting at $100 per 100GB of deduplicated data per month.
