More U.K. companies storing data in the U.S

Many don’t realize that online back-up companies’ services can be utilized from other countries, and that doing so may save time and money. There are several key reasons for this trend:

1) Data center density laws in the U.K., which are not in place in the U.S., allow data centers in the U.S. to provide more power per server cabinet. This is more convenient for online backup resellers, giving them relatively limitless storage. U.S. data centers are able to provide five times the amount of power and five times the amount of storage per cabinet compared to data centers in the U.K. By being able to condense the data centers and use less real estate space, online backup companies in the U.S. are able to offer their services at a much lower price.

2) The currency exchange rate is presently in the U.K.’s favor. One U.S. dollar equals .61 British pounds – meaning that anyone living in the United Kingdom will pay £12 for every $20.

3) Although it may seem like the U.K. is a great distance from the U.S., in reality the countries are only a few fiber hops away in the electronic world. The ping time/latency from the U.S. to the U.K. shows relatively no speed difference than if the backup company were in the same country.  

Almost half of XZ Backup’s customer base is international, with a substantial presence in the U.K. XZ even provides its customers with a technical support/service phone number for London, so that the company is more easily accessible for both users and resellers in the U.K.

Iron Mountain’s online backup services are up for sale – who’s looking to buy?

Information management company, Iron Mountain, is reevaluating its digital business services by eliminating digital archiving, online backup and recovery solutions. The billion-dollar company’s strategic plan is to ‘enhance stockholder value’ by only remaining in the market where they have a leadership position to increase ROIC for stockholders.

Reasons for shedding themselves of their online backup services range from ‘modest levels of adoption’ of the services by customers, to not wanting to compete with the big dogs of storage, such as Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) or Jungle Disk.

Iron Mountain’s CEO, Richard Reese, also mentioned the possibility of partnerships to continue to offer customers remote backup along with other information management systems. Reese said they are also considering repositioning themselves as a reseller - comparable to XZ Backup’s business model.

Iron Mountain joined the online backup world not too long ago in 2009 with Virtual File Store (VFS), a cloud-based storage system and shortly after introduced the Archive Service Platform (ASP), allowing users to integrate the cloud storage in its back end. Current users of VFS are invited to transfer to a higher value File System Archiving (FSA) by next year; however users of ASP will be required to move to a different service provider.

In consideration since fall of 2010, Iron Mountain’s restructuring gives other online backup companies an opportunity to position themselves favorably in the market. White label online backup providers such as XZ Backup, can leverage storage growth trends along with market restructuring and gain a new audience of online backup resellers.

The South African IT Race Is On

The managed services industry is growing rapidly across the globe, everywhere we are finding phenomenal numbers. If you look at revenue breakdowns for public companies in this space, you can clearly see why there’s lots of excitement.

We’d like to bring your attention to South African technology firm EOH, a company with no debt and 212M in cash reserves, who in the last year experienced 20% gains in their Managed Services business. You can find the details in the presentation below, note the segmental reporting on page 7. Over half of EOH’s business is managed services, and the numbers they’re reporting match the trending we found in India last week.
EOH_Bk_T2IB02469~2

The Economist: Big Data On Its Way

We mentioned “Big Data” in a blog post a few days ago, so we would like to point you in the direction of an Economist piece entitled Data, data everywhere. It’s a great run through of the trend, and you walk away with a few solid numbers. What’s the takeaway? Data is a new economic input, on par with labor and capital. New forms of businesses will rise up in the next decade, and their models will rely on information generated by not just desktop computers, but cloud computing platforms, mobile phones, gps sensors, and enumerable other devices that will come to market. We appear to be in the beginning stages, so stay on the lookout.

Special report

A special report on managing information

Data, data everywhere

Information has gone from scarce to superabundant. That brings huge new benefits, says Kenneth Cukier (interviewed here)—but also big headaches

WHEN the Sloan Digital Sky Survey started work in 2000, its telescope in New Mexico collected more data in its first few weeks than had been amassed in the entire history of astronomy. Now, a decade later, its archive contains a whopping 140 terabytes of information. A successor, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, due to come on stream in Chile in 2016, will acquire that quantity of data every five days.

… Continue Reading

What About All the Data?

XZ Backup is primarily in the B2B Storage space providing a complete solutions stack for companies looking to leverage an Infrastructure-as-a-Service utility model for quick integration of Enterprise Online Backup into their business.

We are in daily contact with resellers who are successfully using our management system to deploy disaster recovery services to their established client bases.

If you do a Google Search for “storage growth” you can find all sorts of resources on the numbers relating to disk space sold, market segmentation, and future projections.

Storage Sprawl a Catalyst for High-Growth Data Deduplication Market

With analysts putting data growth in the range of 50 percent or more per year, storing duplicated data is just adding insult to injury.

According to one source, duplication rates run as high as 30 percent or more among companies that don’t have the appropriate policies and tools in place. This might help explain why data deduplication is considered one of the top technologies of the next decade, and why IT solution providers must pay more attention to this still-small-but-growing market segment.

The opportunity is there, the question is how can we take advantage? We believe with our proven program, on-demand infrastructure, and branded customer management system, anyone in the Technology space can now offer their own off-Site, HIPAA compliant, data online backup service.

Data boom to drive storage growth

Storage solutions market in South Asia and the Middle East is expected to grow over next few years, riding on a boom in data growth and enterprises’ need for business continuity, disaster recovery, and regulatory compliance.

Market in India, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Sri Lanka is estimated to climb from $653.4 million in 2008 to $2146.4 million in 2015, says Frost & Sullivan’s Emerging Storage Technologies and Adoption in South Asia and Middle East.

Business continuity, disaster recovery, and regulatory compliance. We are seeing these same responses from our channel Partners. Even the NSA is preparing to store Yottabytes of data by 2015.

The Data is out there, the question is how to get to it, how to maximize your resources to capture the market while it’s still experiencing hyper growth.