WisconsInnovation

Sometimes innovation is inherently complex, but what should the goal of innovation be? Arguably it's to simplify, but sometimes that requires taking a radically-new approach to a traditional problem -- redefining its nature and scale. That is the 'case' study we provide here.

Data Loss Problem

One of the most vexing problems of the digital era is the the nightmare of losing critical digital information on a computer. Large corporations spend significant amounts of money on complex, multi-tier systems. What about a consumer or small business, or how about a large corporation that has such a disparate workforce that in many ways its 'problem' looks like that of traditional consumers? There have always been back-up solutions, but they have traditionally been hardware-intensive, complicated and required a tremendous amount of human management.

Mozy -- a company recently acquired by enterprise-storage player EMC -- provides a subscription-based service that enables consumers and businesses to achieve continuous, off-site back-ups of critical information and programs residing on their computers and servers via their local Internet connection from anywhere in the world. Download a piece of software, select your configuration, and you're done! It's that easy.

What does Mozy do differently, though? The company offers a cost-effective service that is incredibly friendly, easy to use and reliable -- simplicity and reliability -- but yet that is technologically robust. In fact, it is light-years ahead of the competition in terms of capabilities and technical sophistication. In many ways, Mozy is an innovation that is both ‘radical innovation’ and ‘architectural innovation.’ It is also not only an upgrade, relative to competitors, but a complete re-think about how to solve the problem of online/off-site backups for its customers.

Radically-new Approach

The service is the result of one entrepreneur, who realized that the scale and nature of back-up solutions is very different, perhaps, than others might view it -- referring to it as a 'petabyte' problem.

Mozy was founded by Josh Coates as Berkeley Data Systems in Utah. He is a serial entrepreneur, who previously founded another storage company, Scale8, which he sold to Intel. Coates approached Mozy from the standpoint of recognizing a core problem that everyone faces – the risks and challenges involved in keeping important, computer-based information safe – and wondering how he could solve this problem as elegantly and simply as possible. He commented to online technology-news site ‘Techrockies’ in 2006: “My career has been spent around large scale parallel systems. The next problem I wanted to tackle was the backup problem. It seems like such an obvious solution to a problem everyone has – how do you keep your data safe.”

Coates was amazed, though, that –- at the time -– there still was not an easy-to-use and reliable solution, and he was also baffled by the cost and nature of others' solutions to the problem.

The solution seemed simple to Coates: "You back it up remotely. Floods, fires, and earthquakes can't get to you, and if someone steals your laptop you're still safe, and your hard drive is still okay. That's a problem that has never been solved. There are three to four dozen backup companies out there, but none have been terribly successful. I thought to myself—why is this still a problem? Why isn't this a no-brainer? Why isn't there a free, automatic, secure backup solution out there? Well, it doesn't take long to figure out why. If you're Yahoo, or Google, with a ten million user base, with 1 or 2G of backup data, that's ten to twenty petabytes. That's why there isn't this ubiquitous remote backup solution out there. I wanted to fix this."

Coates was convinced that no off-the-shelf solution would be sufficient or cost-effective. So he took a different technology approach to Mozy's storage systems than competitors' – a proprietary ‘petabyte’ architecture that he found actually costs dramatically less to operate at scale.

This platform/economics combination enabled Mozy to offer a very compelling amount of value for such a low price. The result, today, is a service that for many consumers with small storage needs is free, and for others and for small businesses it costs only an incremental monthly fee.

Data Revolution?

The company was launched in 2004; it came out of 'stealth mode' in 2006; and it was acquired by EMC in 2007. So it's had a lot of recent attention. So what?

First, it's a great service (which this blog poster can verify, given he has three computers backing up each day via Mozy's premium/paid service).

Second, and most importantly, it represents a tremendous face lift on storage architecture -- one that will undoubtedly impact the industry in numerous ways over the coming decade.