The Planet Bows Cloud Storage

HOUSTON -- The Planet, the global leader in IT hosting, today 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(TM) (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."

The Planet Internet Services Inc.