It seemed like a strange fit when enterprise storage giant EMC bought Berkeley Data Systems, operators of the Mozy consumer online backup service. After all, many, if not most, of Mozy's users were taking advantage of the free plan that allowed them to backup up to 2 GB of data. These obviously aren't the same people that make multimillion dollar investments in Symmetrix.

Today it starts to make sense as EMC announced that MozyEnterprise will run on its storage-as-a-service platform EMC Fortress.MozyEnterprise, while it can backup small servers, is still best used to protect data on laptops and desktops. It uses basically the same backup engine as consumer Mozy, with central monitoring, managed agent installation, and, most significantly, centralized key management, so the sales manager in Kalamazoo can't lose his encryption key along with his laptop. Since Mozy uses an incremental forever backup method, branch offices and even telecommuters should have enough bandwidth for their daily backups. MozyEnterprise adds the ability for organizations to seed the process by making the initial backup to a USB drive and shipping that in to EMC.

EMC also is giving enterprise customers 24/7 tech support, e-mail alerts, and access to a problem knowledgebase.

While MozyEnterprise by itself is somewhat interesting, EMC's describing EMC Fortress as platform for other applications from EMC and others through a set of APIs. If developers find EMC Fortress as attractive as they've found Amazon's S3, a whole raft of interesting storage applications could be coming down the Web 2.0 pike.