As expected (CI No 3,691) Storage Technology Corp announced a new storage utility strategy on Monday, offering customers the option of making monthly payments for a storage service, situated either on or off site over the internet. The service includes management of disk, tape, storage area network and backup and restore technologies. The company hopes the new strategy will help it sell storage systems to capital constrained small and medium-sized businesses, a market that has so far eluded it. It’s particularly targeting internet companies.
Three firms, Seattle, Washington-based Atrieva Corp, San Jose, California-based Frontier GlobalCenter Inc, and Torrance, California-based WebVision Inc, are the first customers. Atrieva offers PC backup services over the internet, and Frontier GlobalCenter offers content distribution services to customers such as Yahoo! Inc and About.com. WebVision offers e-commerce applications, network management and internet data center services.
Customers pay on a cost-per-megabyte basis every month. Storagetek offers remote monitoring and management services, and a capacity buffer of extra storage for unexpected demand peaks.
