Exodus Communications has signed a storage agreement with services provider WorldStor, and with that deal it has driven the last nail in the coffin of its own storage services strategy.
Storage is the hot, new managed service that has providers of every stripe giddy over a potential new revenue stream. But storage and Web hosting businesses dont mix, the Exodus deal shows: Developing storage services in-house is so expensive that providers are forced to at least consider the option of outsourcing.
Exodus, the worlds largest Web hoster, has offered storage services for some time, both through its own DataVault unit, and through partnerships with storage equipment makers EMC and Sun Microsystems. Exodus, however, sold its DataVault backup unit to Sanrise in January, and subsequently cut deals with StorageNetworks and, now, WorldStor. The deals let Exodus resell storage services to its own customers.
WorldStor plans to announce several managed service provider partnerships in the near future.
“We get called by a dozen to 15 data center companies a month asking for our services, some of whom have purchased hardware to do storage, but dont know how to implement it,” WorldStor Chief Executive Paul Battaglia says.