Autonomy inhales Iron Mountain's 6PB cloud

UK information management company Autonomy has agreed to buy selected assets from Iron Mountain’s cloud storage business for US$380 million. 

The deal will bring 6,000 customers and six petabytes of customer data to Autonomy’s cloud from Iron Mountain’s digital archiving, eDiscovery and online backup and recovery services. 

The acquisition would make Autonomy's storage cloud 25 petabytes in size, which the company's CEO Dr Mike Lynch claimed made it the "world's largest private cloud platform".

Autonomy did not acquire Iron Mountain’s medical records archive or technology escrow service, according to a statement.  

Last month Iron Mountain CEO Richard Reece said the company could not afford the development costs to maintain the service. 

Iron Mountain had planned to shut down its cloud archive at some stage next year. Autonomy said today that Active Iron Mountain customers would continue to be supported.   

"In 2007 we correctly predicted the merging of regulatory archiving and search, and we believe we are now seeing the next phase where the convergence of regulatory archiving, back-up and data restoration with operational processing of data in the cloud is coming to pass,” said Autonomy's Lynch.