The Cloud Computing Newswire

Clouds bring rain and rain means rust and so Iron Mountain, the seemingly promising cloud storage house - under pressure from a major stockholder after a nasty $54 million loss last year followed the company's giddy $221 million gain in 2009 - says it will be exiting commodity cloud storage by early 2013. It stopped taking new customers the first of the month.

The stockholder, which owns slightly less than 5% of Iron Mountain, is the Elliott Management hedge fund that put Novell in play and will, if the deal ever goes through, have a position in Novell's acquirer, Attachmate.

Elliott wants Iron Mountain to morph into a real estate investment trust (REIT) for the tax benefits and profit sharing and is currently fighting with the company over board seats and poison pills. Elliott's got a "100-day plan" that calls for the company to do a "full strategic review" of its situation.

Evidently Iron Mountain can't compete against Amazon, Mozy, Google, Carbonite, CommVault et al and so will close its low-cost enterprise-grade Virtual File Store for archiving little-used data and its Archive Service Platform, which gives third parties entry to Iron Mountain's cloud. It's fighting to stay in the IP and e-discovery markets.

Zetta, for one, is offering to pitch in, waiving 30 days of storage charges for the dispossessed. It says data currently stored in Iron Mountain can be automatically migrated into its Storage Service without bandwidth or I/O usage charges, just a flat rate per GB stored. Ditto Nirvanix, the other pure-play storage provider.