Pure-play hosted storage providers such as VeriCenter are emerging again, but they're offering a mix of services, from monitoring storage systems to archiving e-mail and backing up and restoring file systems.

Various Flavors

Over the past two years, major vendors such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard Co. and Iron Mountain Inc. have introduced online storage backup services targeted more at disaster recovery and business continuity. The vendors are able to draw on their vast number of regional data centers to host storage for those purposes.

The services, much like SunGard Data Systems Inc.'s Availability Services, are also being offered by telecommunications companies such as AT&T Corp. and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp.

There are also more than a dozen smaller vendors offering online backup and recovery, including continuous data protection products that can take snapshots of data every time it changes and back that up across the Internet. LiveVault Corp., Asigra Inc., Scale Eight Inc., EVault Inc., IPR International LLC and AmeriVault Corp. are all part of that niche.