Benefits of storage cloud include an enterprise-class feature set, policy-driven management and centralized reporting.

The Planet, a privately held dedicated hosting company, today announced limited availability of its new on-demand storage cloud service. The company claims that it has merged on-premise storage performance with cloud storage capabilities, which allows companies to extend their hosted environments directly into the cloud. By combining two products into a single offering, it avers that customers gain additional benefits, including free uploads to the local node and a single policy-driven account to manage all file-based storage needs.

The company explains that through its partnership with Nirvanix and its Storage Delivery Network, customers can select precisely where they want to house their data in the storage cloud. Nirvanix operates a global cluster of storage nodes on the East and West Coasts of the United States, as well as in Europe and Asia. Customers can select storage from its node or from any Nirvanix location, it adds.

It claims that it will initially offer the new storage cloud product to existing hosting customers. During the first quarter, the portfolio will provide opportunities for non-hosted, storage-only customers to benefit from cloud storage.

"While cloud storage often appears to be an economical approach for solving the storage dilemma so many companies face, there are often unanticipated fees," said Rob Walters, general manager for The Planet's Storage and Data Protection line of business. "Hidden bandwidth charges and the costs for actually accessing data – commonly known as puts, gets and lists – actually cause the economies to quickly evaporate. We're able to offer a flat fee so that customers know precisely what they're paying for – storage capacity and bandwidth – which is even more important in today's difficult economy."

"By building on the Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network, The Planet combines the best of both worlds so that customers are the real winners," said Nirvanix CEO Patrick Harr. "They can either access our local Dallas node or optimize storage in virtually any corner of the world from our global cluster, combined with very attractive pricing and SLA options for building and scaling their next-generation Internet applications."