A new analysis from Bedford Report says that cloud storage is rapidly growing from a small percent of the IT market to a significant opportunity for businesses.

The report also examines the outlook for companies in the computer storage devices industry. Particularly, the report provides stock research on Brocade Communications Systems (News - Alert).

Brocade's "CloudPlex" cloud architecture is an open framework that enables the development of virtualized data centers that combines computing, storage and networking components into a single converged architecture. This concept, according to Bedford Report, brings the storage and IP networking vendor into the converged infrastructure market.

The company reported a fall in net income to $1.9 million in the fiscal third quarter, or breakeven on a per-share basis, in the three months ended July 30. That compares with net income of $22.5 million, or 5 cents a share, in the prior-year quarter

AMI Partners’ recent report, US SMB Playbook, says the surge of cloud computing is growing rapidly, with the market for hosted storage set to increase 11 percent yearly until 2015. Cloud computing is becoming the preferred choice of organizations not only because of its cost savings but also because of the flexibility.

NetApp, another provider of cloud storage and virtual server, said the company’s virtualized storage management "OnCommand" simplifies cloud storage for end-user customers through a range of services, and is able to replicate the offering in several places.

Back in June, NetApp and Cisco (News - Alert) announced that more than 150 customers implemented their joint data center solutions based on the FlexPod design architecture. FlexPod from Cisco and NetApp combines networking, computing and storage in a shared infrastructure

The company reported fiscal first quarter revenues of $1.46 billion, up 26.4 percent from $1.15 billion in the year-ago quarter.

Want to learn more about cloud communications? Then be sure to attend the Cloud Communications Summit, collocated with TMC’s (News - Alert) ITEXPO West 2011, taking place Sept. 13-15, 2011, in Austin, Texas. The Cloud Communications Summit will address a growing need of businesses to integrate and leverage cloud based communications applications, process enhancement techniques, and network based communications interfaces and architectures. To register, click here.