Storage Services Added to Carriers RepertoireStorage Services Added to Carriers Repertoire

Increasingly, small and medium businesses are handing their IT functions over to third parties. One service provider has been trying to build a comprehensive suite of managed services and teamed with a leading online storage supplier to add that piece to its lineup.Concentric, a business unit of XO Communications, announced Concentric Managed Backup. The hosted service provides small and medium sized businesses with online, disk-to-disk backup capabilities designed to provide 24x7 data protection and recovery capabilities. The service has some attractive features. It is efficient. Only new and changed data at the block level is compressed, encrypted and transmitted offsite to Concentrics data centers. To simplify deployments, the service features Web-based administration. Also the backup service works with a variety of devices, including those running Microsofts Windows, Novell s NetWare, Linux, Sun Solaris, HP-UX, IBM, AIX, IBM i ,and VMWare, as well as applications, such as Microsofts Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint, and Cluster Services, and Oracle products. To assuage security concerns, Concentric Managed Backup supports AES encryption, and only customers have the password to unlock their own data. Pricing for the service ranges from $115 per month for 25G bytes of information to $2,025 for 1T byte of data. Concentrics service is powered by EVault, a backup and recovery service from i365, a Seagate Company.

A wide variety of vendors have developed online backup services recently, so the field has become quite crowded. Concentric plans to try and differentiate its service by relying on a US-based customer service team. In addition, the service provider has been building a broad suite of managed services: applications hosting, email, anti-spam and anti-virus solutions, and managed servers. The company thinks small and medium businesses would prefer to use one carrier for a variety of service instead of having a number of service providers with autonomous offerings.

However, competition in the service sector has intensified. Traditional telcos, such as AT&T and Verizon, have been going after the small and medium businesses. Startups have also been developing these services, and many established vendors have been augmenting product and software revenue with various hosted services. Concentric has a strong focus, but time will tell whether or not that is sufficient for it to emerge as a major player in the rapidly evolving, highly competitive services market.