Storage Cloud Offered by Houston Hosting Vendor

Houston-based The Planet, an IT hosting vendor, has announced the general availability of its new Storage Cloud service. Customers can choose from an on-premise local node in The Planet’s Dallas D2 data center, or from locations on the East or West Coasts and Europe or Asia, through its partnership with Nirvanix (News - Alert). The company also offers Storage Cloud options for organizations that do not require hosting.

Coupled with a server hosted at The Planet, customers get on-premise Network Attached Storage with the access and usage-based billing features of Storage Cloud. All Storage Cloud customers with servers hosted at The Planet are connected through its network. The service is being marketed as a way for customers to "eliminate the hassle of managing two separate invoices, one for on-premise file storage and another for cloud-based offerings," since The Planet Storage Cloud provides both services in a single account.

It isn't completely unknown for cloud storage platforms to surprise customers with inflated invoices due to unexpected and hidden transactional fees. Rob Walters, general manager for The Planet’s Storage and Data Protection business, touts what he calls The Planet's "no-surprises philosophy" in avoiding such scenarios.

 

Earlier this month TMC reported that The Planet announced plans to open an international data center in London.

Pricing starts at 25 cents per gigabyte, with discounts as customers use more. It isn't out of line for other hosting companies to charge between 60 cents and $1 for equivalent NAS-type products. The Planet says bandwidth charges are incurred only for outbound-transactions, and all uploads to The Planet Storage Cloud node are free. The firm provides customers a single account for managing both their hosted environment and storage cloud platform, and the Storage Cloud platform is accessible through CIFS, NFS, FTP and HTTP, as well as an extensible API streamlining integration.

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