Managed hosting vendor The Planet has announced the availability of an on-demand storage cloud service that merges on-premises storage performance with cloud storage capabilities.Through its partnership with Nirvanix, a cloud storage provider that operates a geographically distributed "Storage Delivery Network," customers can store their data on a local node at The Planet's Dallas data center or any of Nirvanix's global cluster of storage nodes on the East and West Coasts of the United States, as well as in Europe and Asia.

"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 Service Level Agreement (SLA) options for building and scaling their next-generation Internet applications."

Storage Cloud pricing varies by capacity, starting with 0-5 TB, which costs 40-cents per gigabyte on the Planet Node and 25-cents per gigabyteB on a remote note. Bandwidth is 15-cents per gigabyte for the first 10 TB transferred and 14-cents per gigabyte beyond that. The SLA is as follows:

• 99.9% for a one-node policy (data in one location only); • 99.99% for a two-node policy (data in two locations); and • 100% for a three-node policy (data is three locations).

The Planet will initially offer the new storage cloud product to existing hosting customers but will expand the offering to nonhosted, storage-only customers who only want cloud storage early next year. It is worth noting that competitor Amazon Simple Storage Service's (Amazon S3) SLA is only 99.9%, with no option for improving that by replicating data to other locations.