"Today it is my pleasure to announce that VMware has hired the team and acquired assets behind EMC’s Mozy cloud-based data protection service," wrote VMware CTO and former Cloud Expo keynoter Steve Herrod Monday, as VMware continued its quest, through strategic acquisitions if necessary, to bring the enterprise hybrid cloud to its customers and partners.


Steve Herrod, VMware CTO, during his Virtualization Conference & Expo Keynote in New York City

"VMware will operate the Mozy service on behalf of EMC without interruption," Herrod continued, adding:

"However, the strategic relevance of today’s news is what this group brings to VMware. Over the past 5 years, Mozy has built one of the best examples of a globally distributed, large-scale cloud offering. We believe that, by being directly engaged with the delivery of such a service, VMware will further ramp our own cloud-related learning and accelerate new IP, scale, and capabilities into the products that we provide to our customers and public cloud partners."

Herrod went on to discuss some of the numbers underlying VMware's interest in Mozy: more than 1 million users, 70,000 business customers, and a worldwide network of datacenters storing more than 70 petabytes of data.

(70 petabytes, Herrod pointed out, is enough to store the entire written works of mankind from the beginning of recorded history...in all languages...with 20 petabytes to spare.)

Mozy, Herrod explained, is about more than simple backup of all of this data. "Mozy has taken the base technology that keeps you from losing your data," he said, "and turned it into a scalable, fail-safe way of building out a collection of highly-automated datacenters with strong security and 24/7 operations fronted by elegant, user interfaces across many client types.

According to Herrod this makes Mozy what he calls "the foundational architecture for the many cloud-based services being delivered today."