Simon leads CommVault's Information Access & Management business including Information Risk, eDiscovery, Compliance and Information Search.

Over the last 20 years he has worked for many large multi-national while building deep expertise in a range of topics including business intelligence, data warehousing, application and information management.

Most recently, Simon has gained specific experience in data retention and archiving, working for or with some of the leading companies in this field to gain specialist knowledge in information risk and compliance.

Raising the SS Mimosa

Wednesday, March 03, 2010

After countless industry rumors, the capsizing "Mimosa" looks set to finally be rescued by the battleship "Iron Mountain". Despite the fanfare, there is a question. Does this make sense?

Obviously for Mimosa, it's good news as Iron Mountain can bring much needed resources and stability. For Iron Mountain and their customers, this acquisition could be considered a step in the wrong direction. Iron Mountain already has spent considerable effort establishing an interface for a variety of industry leading archiving vendors to pass data into its digital service. CommVault, in particular, has leveraged this interface to help customers protect and retain their information by integrating our unified data management software Simpana (with its FIPS certified security and encryption capabilities) with Iron Mountain's cloud storage services.

What this means is that CommVault Simpana can provide full on-premise data management that can enable its customers to seamlessly move data to the Iron Mountain cloud as well as to a number of other cloud and MSP providers. Use cases include data tiering, backup, archiving, eDiscovery preservation and compliance that address both unstructured and structured sources including email, files, documents, databases and, of course, SharePoint. All of this is as simple as a mouse click (see illustration below).

In contrast, Mimosa does not offer this integration and indeed the architecture of its technology would appear to do little to enable it. The result – the acquisition is unlikely to help Iron Mountain's customers (except maybe those who have already invested in Mimosa's products). Fortunately, those same Iron Mountain customers have the option of choosing an existing cloud-enabled solution with full on-premise archive capabilities designed from the ground up as the leading data cost and storage efficiency solution with seamless integrated support for the Iron Mountain cloud.

The statements from both companies indicate that the acquisition complements Iron Mountain's off-premise digital service as THE on-premise archive solution. In reality, this is the second archiving acquisition by Iron Mountain in as many years. Whilst the nature of the acquisition endorses how important archiving is to their customers what it doesn't highlight is how Mimosa will enhance the Iron Mountain TCO story.

The key issues both sets of customers will now face is how quickly and how well the technical integration will go given Iron Mountain's previous acquisition and integration efforts in this area. In contrast, the CommVault Simpana software integration with Iron Mountain is fully integrated and operational today. If you're an existing Iron Mountain customer looking to archive in the most efficient, secure and risk adverse way, what would you choose?

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