Iron Mountain - where companies have been storing their IP and data for a couple of generations now - has opened its Archive Services Platform so developers and ISVs can offer its cloud storage with their applications.

The great $3 billion-a-year pack rat has never extended its platform to outside application developers before.

Besides long-term data storage for data-intensive apps, Iron Mountain is also offering use of its own advanced indexing, full-text search, retrieval, metadata support, retention and destruction.

The company claims to be more practiced at this cloud stuff than other people. It's been providing cloud storage solutions since 1995 when it brought out Connected Backup for PC and started using the Internet to provide secure backup for companies' and individuals' PC data.

It subsequently developed a Storage-as-a-Service suite of solutions for everything from secure e-mail to file and image archiving, online backup and recovery and software escrow.

Founded in 1951, Iron Mountain has 140,000 corporate clients worldwide and can argue security and reliability. On the face of its reputation it should pose a very serious competitor to the other cloud storage wannabes.

Taneja Group director of validation services Jeff Boles said, "The cloud is bursting with companies eager to deliver storage services to business customers. Success will require a lot more than a simple API and a bucket of storage on the remote end of a wire."

Iron Mountain has set up a developer program to provide third parties with the tools to integrate with its enterprise-class cloud archiving services either by coding to a Web Services API or through a set of command-line tools.

Besides the SOAP and REST Web Services interfaces, the platform uses standard NFS and CIFS interfaces and offers petabyte scalability.

Data is stored using 256 AES encryption technology and the platform is WORM-enabled when retention is applied.

Data is stored redundantly within and across geographically split data centers, in other words, four times across two data centers.

Stored data is full-text indexed when it comes in and can be searched by ID, content and metadata. The platform computes SHA-256 hashes of the data and check hashes for discrepancies on each and every step of storage and retrieval to guarantee data integrity.

Iron Mountain employs both Secure Socket Layer (SSL) and Transport Socket Layer (TSL) security and certificates, good for a year, instead of just user IDs and passwords in transmitting digital assets to and from its data centers. Each transaction includes bilateral authentication.

The company's also got a lot of physical security: underground sites, real-time closed circuit TV monitoring, a commercial-level power grid with generator backup, on-site firefighting apparatus and personnel, and multi-tiered access controls. Only authorized personnel with biometric passes are reportedly allowed in specific areas.

The company's vague on the actual numbers but says that users are charged a monthly per/GB storage fee and "there are no hidden charges for transmitting or retrieving data." Developers will be sent a bill itemizing each customer's storage use every month.

They can also use a co-branding "Protected by Iron Mountain" logo.