Iron Mountain to Close its Virtual File Store Service

About two years ago I wrote a blog post wondering if we could outsource the preservation of digital bits. What prompted that blog post was an announcement from Iron Mountain of a Cloud-Based File Archiving service. Since then there have been a number of other services that have sprung up that are more attuned to the needs of cultural heritage communities (DuraCloud and Chronopolis come to mind), but I have wondered if the commercial sector had a way to do this cheaply and efficiently. The answer to that question is "maybe not" as Iron Mountain has told Gartner Group (PDF archive) that it is closing its Virtual File Store services and its Archive Service Platform.

The Gartner analysis goes on to say: "Virtual File Store customers that stay with Iron Mountain will be transferred to a higher-value offering, File System Archiving (FSA) in 2012. The new offering will be a hybrid that leverages policy-based archiving on site and in the cloud with indexing and classification capabilities." The Register has more details and speculation about what happened. As always, the full story might be more interesting that what the news reports are saying. In any case -- just to close this loop -- if you were thinking of trying this particular option, think no further.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://www.ironmountain.com/digital-archiving/inactive-data-file-archiving.html on June 9th, 2011.