Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/29/netapp_iron_mountain_healthcare_cloud/
NetApp team tags Iron Mountain for cloudy medical archiving
Healthcare play
Posted in Storage, 29th November 2011 08:32 GMT
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Iron Mountain is rebuilding its remnant cloud medical records archiving business with a dose of NetApp's StorageGRID..
Iron Mountain sold the bulk of its cloud business [1], meaning eDiscovery, archiving and online backup, to Autonomy in May this year for $380m. Autonomy was bought by HP later this year. Iron Mountain's cloud investments were disastrous, causing it to dump its CEO [2] and cave-in to demands by activist investors for change. Iron Mountain kept the medical records archive business: healthcare appears to be a solid cloud storage prospect.
Now it is teaming up with NetApp to offer cloud medical data archiving and disaster recovery to healthcare organisations. There is a NetApp Service Provider Program, which was launched in June last year, and Iron Mountain is a member, the only one with a healthcare bent. It is integrating StorageGRID, NetApp's Bycast technology product, with its Digital Record Center for Medical Images and its vendor-neutral archive offering.
NetApp bought Bycast and its StorageGRID [3] technology in June last year, ironically during the period when Iron Mountain was enduring its cloud storage troubles. There were then more than 250 customers for the product. Iron Mountain, a Bycast OEM, issued a supportive statement about NetApp's acquisition at the time.
By putting StorageGRID in the cloud, customers can change a CAPEX product purchase into an OPEX service delivery cost, and Iron Mountain will get continuing subscription revenue from StorageGRID customers, with NetApp, presumably, getting a slice. The customers can run a hybrid private/public cloud operation of they wish – a halfway house to a full public cloud service.
Iron Mountain's Ken Rubin – its SVP and GM for healthcare – delivers the marketing spiel in a nutshell: "The explosion of clinical, patient, and imaging data and shrinking budgets have boxed many healthcare organisations into a corner, straining their storage capacity and IT resources to the limit. The answer is cloud-based storage and archiving. Iron Mountain’s medical image archiving offerings deliver the best of all worlds: unlimited capacity on a pay-as-you-go basis with improved off-site disaster recovery that is more cost effective and less complicated than doing it yourself."
This partnership emphasises the appeal of object storage as a cloud storage technology, even though it is firmly in the niche object storage heartland of fixed medical content. ®