WWE Wrestles With Storage

Xdrive Inc. must have missed the memo stating that storage as a service won't work. The storage service vendor is about to launch the second phase of its Web-based storage-and document-management service by adding timed backup and recovery.

Testing will begin this week on the backup feature, which lets customers simply click on the word Backup to make a complete or incremental copy of their data. Early next year, Xdrive plans to add features to improve online customer support and enhance the site's workgroup capabilities so multiple workers can be confident they're all using the same data. The existing workgroup version is priced at $99 per month for almost 2 Mbytes of capacity.

The service is a boon to Marty Pingree, remote technical manager at World Wrestling Entertainment Corp., which has been using Xdrive for about eight months. WWE travels from city to city to put on shows and hires part-time employees in each location, and Pingree found it difficult to keep up with changing E-mail addresses to send messages to workers in each city. "I needed a secure central site with wide range," he says.

At first, Pingree just used Xdrive to post messages. After a while, he noticed that other WWE departments were storing their data on the service. He now can look up last year's plans for a show in a specific city and use it to develop a new show in the same city. Pingree likes posting the information on Xdrive. "I didn't want to be liable for people getting in" to the network, he says. "I don't have to call corporate IT when I have a problem. Storing and sending messages is Xdrive's bread and butter."

Transmitting documents to remote users securely can be "somewhat of a nightmare for lots of small and medium companies," says analyst Nancy Marrone at Enterprise Storage Group. She says Xdrive's service can provide those companies with security, storage, and a clean backup copy of the stored data.

Photo of Marty Pingree courtesy of WWE