VMware has snapped up the team and assets behind EMC’s Mozy cloud-based data protection service.

The firm says it will operate the Mozy service on behalf of EMC without interruption.

"Over the past 5 years, Mozy has built one of the best examples of a globally distributed, large-scale cloud offering,” said VMware CTO, Steve Herrod.

"We believe that, by being directly engaged with the delivery of such a service, VMware will further ramp our own cloud-related learning and accelerate new IP, scale, and capabilities into the products that we provide to our customers and public cloud partners.”

Mozy is said to have more than 1 million users, 70,000 business customers and a worldwide network of datacenters storing more than 70 petabytes of data.

Herrod said the deal is about more than just simple backup of all of this data.

"Mozy has taken the base technology that keeps you from losing your data and turned it into a scalable, fail-safe way of building out a collection of highly-automated datacenters with strong security and 24/7 operations fronted by elegant, user interfaces across many client types. This is the foundational architecture for the many cloud-based services being delivered today,” he said.

The Mozy team will work with VMware to serve the SMB community.

"In the past year, our customer base grew by more than 50,000 customers, the majority of which came from the SMB community,” continued Herrod. "It’s clear that organisations of this size (with little or no IT staff) are moving even more rapidly to adopt IT services via the public cloud.”

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