Checkets said: "The technology in the back-end systems is very scalable and very reliable." He said 3X mirroring is common in large service providers such as Yahoo!, with three different copies of data in three separate data centres so the data is always available, no matter what. "We don't have the same overhead but offer the same or better reliability. Multi-petabyte storage systems are our speciality."

Since the acquisition: "We've been working on both hardware and software with EMC to optimise our data centres. We view the storage architecture in the data centres as pretty critical intellectual property." Not surprisingly details of it are not forthcoming.

Checketts said that, for Mozy founder Josh Coates, Mozy was his third experience of designing a multi-petabyte database. Such experience is pretty rare.

The current Mozy customer statistics: 700,000+ customers; 7.5PB of data stored in 6.2 billion files, could grow a hundredfold. We could be loking at, within two years in the writer's estimate, at 7 million customers, 750PB of data and 620 billion files. This is going to need a massive infrastructure build out and only very well capitalised companies will be able to compete in storage-in-the-cloud services.

Let's guesstimate a base [Rather conservative - Ed.] $2.5 million per data centre cost and assume twenty are needed for global coverage, meaning a total investment of $50 million. Who are the likely main players who are active and could potentially afford it?

• 1. Google,
• 2. Amazon and S3,
• 3. IBM and its cloud storage services,
• 4. Nirvanix and its SDN,
• 5. Microsoft and its LiveMesh,
• 6. EMC and Mozy,
• 7. HP and Upline.

Sun had a storage in the cloud service but it seems to be a back burner effort now. It is possible that global telcos are also looking at this space.

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