The Planet Launches Storage Cloud

The Planet, in IT hosting, announced limited availability of its new highly scalable and on-demand storage cloud service. In an industry first, The Planet has merged on-premise storage performance with cloud storage capabilities, which opens a whole new world for companies to extend their hosted environments directly into the cloud. By combining two products into a single offering, customers gain additional benefits, including free uploads to the local node and a single policy-driven account to manage all file-based storage needs.

Today, many companies are hesitant to build their businesses on the available cloud platforms due to hidden fees and inconsistent performance. By contrast, The Planet provides simple and transparent pricing, backed by an industry-leading Service Level Agreement (SLA), creating an attractive and highly competitive value proposition. In addition, The Planet offers the industry’s only geographically distributed cloud storage platform.

Through its partnership with Nirvanix and its Storage Delivery Network (SDN) – which offers a resident mid-continent node in The Planet’s Dallas D2 data center – 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 The Planet’s node or from any Nirvanix location.

“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.”

“Cloud-based storage is particularly beneficial to rapidly growing startups like NutshellMail.com,” said Mark Schmulen, co-founder of the company. “We enjoy the benefits of infinite scalability while only paying for exactly what we use. When we started hosting NutshellMail.com with The Planet, they hadn’t introduced a cloud storage offering, so we had to look elsewhere. We are excited about The Planet’s new storage offering because it gives us improved performance, enhanced features, and better service at a significantly lower price.”

The Planet 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 reap the benefits of cloud storage.

The Planet Storage Cloud – A Superior Approach
With The Planet Storage Cloud, customers gain a broad range of benefits to satisfy their increasingly diverse and complex storage needs:

• Simple pricing – no hidden fees: With true utility billing, customers pay only for what they use, including no bandwidth fees for internal transfers and free uploads to the local node.
• Rapid integration: Full support for standard protocols includes NFS, CIFS, FTP and HTTP, which means customers aren’t locked into or limited by platform-specific interfaces.
• A single system to manage: Many providers require customers to purchase two separate systems – one for in-data-center file storage and the other for cloud – with neither connected. Now, The Planet eliminates the management headaches and enables customers to manage both with a single account.
• Enterprise-class feature set: The full file system offers a hierarchical structure with no 5GB size limits offered by other providers. In addition, customers can take advantage of rich video transcoding capabilities and the availability of an extensible API for customization.
• Policy-driven management: With just one account, customers can set replication policies for both services under a single account, and then simply ‘set it and forget it.’
• Centralized reporting: With a single account, The Planet provides customers with a single report on all file storage and bandwidth usage.