EMC Mozy terminates the provision of unlimited cloud storage services

As one of the first independent cloud storage services to penetrate the consumer and commercial markets, Mozy recently announced that it would terminate the provision of unlimited capacity services and modify the pricing structure for home users.

Previously, the price of Mozyhom services, which did not restrict capacity, was $4.95 per month, and now each computer is charged $5.99 a month for each 50GB capacity, and the price of up to three PCs 125GB storage capacity is $9.99 a month.

Each additional computer, or 20GB per additional capacity, adds 2 dollars a month. New pricing rules for new users will start on January 31, and pricing for existing users will change from March 1.

At first glance, this seems to be contrary to the trend in the industry to lower prices as competition intensifies. For example, the Amazon S3 (simple Storage service) Last May lowered the price of "reduce redundancy" (reduce backup) storage services to 10 cents a month per gigabyte, compared to 15 cents per gigabyte for regular storage. As the amount of data saved by the user continues to increase, the price per gigabyte for these two levels has declined.

Other services, such as SugarSync, Backblaze, DropBox, box, and Carbonite, either lower prices or provide more free capacity-typically about 5GB per account.

Intense competition

This is not exactly an equal contrast, but Amazon said last year that more companies are looking for customers in this area and see a need for more price competitiveness.

"I'm not sure I saw this (because prices have lowered the price of cloud storage), but we did see changes in consumer behaviour," said Russ Stockdale, vice president of Mozy products management. ”

"Their cameras and mobile devices are producing more and more pictures and videos, so their data is growing fast," he said. If you're pricing on a per GB basis (like Amazon S3), yes, storage will be cheaper. But at the same time, this will be submerged in the total storage growth of each user, because they want to save more and more pictures and videos. ”

"Especially when the most intensive users produce large amounts of data. ”

Stockdale says EMC Mozy is not bothered by service level issues, but EMC believes it must do something to deal with a handful of storage users who take advantage of this unlimited capacity pattern.

"The average user growth rate is rising fast," Stockdale said. The situation is that most users are growing at a manageable rate, but the high growth rate of a small number of users affects the whole. In fact, the 10% per cent high growth rate is equivalent to the remaining 90% per cent growth rate. ”

He said he did not want it to sound as if the increase in storage capacity was unfair because it was not. "Users can now generate more content than ever before. This was impossible a few years ago. Now, you go to a ball game, and one afternoon you might be able to shoot a 2GB sized HD video. ”