New cloud-based storage service aimed at inactive data

Iron Mountain announced a cloud-based storage service for data backup uses as part of its digital archiving and storage-as-a-service offerings.

The new Virtual File Store (VFS), offered through the Boston-based vendor's Iron Mountain Digital division, is being pitched as an enterprise-class archiving service that gives users a lower-cost means of storing and managing static data files than keeping them on in-house systems does.

John Chancy, president of Iron Mountain Digital, said in a statement that the online storage service is targeted at the “50% to 60% of corporate data” that is inactive.

“Storing all that data in-house is not a sustainable storage strategy for companies today that are faced with soaring storage costs and shrinking IT budgets ,” Chancy claimed. He added that VFS can free up “precious storage resources” for users, while ensuring that archived data is secure and easily accessible if needed for electronic discovery or other purposes.

Elliott Townsend, IT manager at Bruns-Pak Corp. in Edison, N.J., said as part of Iron Mountain's announcement that the data center design and construction services firm is currently using VFS along with Iron Mountain Digital's LiveVault service for backing up server data. The combination gives Bruns-Pak “an extremely robust and cost-effective disaster recovery solution,” Townsend said.

Iron Mountain said VFS offers virtually unlimited storage capacity and can be integrated with a company's existing storage infrastructure to migrate inactive files to the vendor's data centers over a VPN. Authorized users can then retrieve files on an on-demand basis via a secure Internet connection, and applications can be set to automatically access data as needed.

The new service is priced on a gigabyte-per-month fee that factors in the length of retention time as well as the amount of data being stored, according to Iron Mountain. But representatives of the company were unable to give specific cost information Monday.