In an effort to diversify its Cloud offerings, NaviSite - a Time Warner Cable Cloud computing and managed hosting company - announced plans to offer storage service for customers in what one analyst says could the beginning of service providers looking to offer big data analysis from the Cloud.

The general reaction to Google Drive from the tech press today can be summed up thusly: "We like it, but couldn't it have been released two years ago?"

Just how big is Amazon Web Service's (S3) Simple Storage Service? Well, it holds 905 billion objects, and it's growing by a billion per day, the company says.

Those of us with a bit of institutional memory recall a brash upstart named Network Appliance that burst onto the storage scene to challenge EMC -- itself once a brash newcomer -- and other storage royalty like IBM. But that was 20 years ago, as difficult as that seems to believe, and the company, now named NetApp, is $5 billion-plus storage leader in its own right.

Australian technology developer and cloud computing specialist, Jasco Consulting, has partnered up with data protection vendor, i365 to expand its OneNimbus cloud portfolio.

Cloud storage seems like such a no-brainer for backups and disaster recovery, it's a wonder that more businesses aren't taking advantage of it. If you're concerned about cloud outages, cloud storage costs, data loss, data security, or the ability to push your nightly backup sets up the Internet straw, Riverbed Technology's Whitewater appliance may make cloud storage easier to embrace.

Tablet computing is a decade-old technology, but one that lay buried since users rejected Microsoft's "heavy OS" approach a while back. A year ago, Apple's iPad resurrected the tablet computing concept, delivering a lightweight sheet of computational glass with a pleasant, responsive user interface and a blizzard of applications. Users love it, and now a barrage of wannabe tablets are flooding the marketplace. All do reasonably well at the four applications users access most: Web, email, books, and media. And the half million or so apps in the collective app stores of Apple, Android, and BlackBerry would seem to fill every conceivable mobile need.

The European Union is giving €15.7 million (US$21.4 million) for a research project that will explore new technologies around cloud computing, including data mobility and secure access control.

Given that Cloud computing is still emerging, it shouldn't come as a surprise that opinions vary widely on the best way to architect the storage. In fact, it seems likely that there is no such panacea - different types of private Cloud almost always require different approaches.

Google's introduction of free online storage for any type of file serves as a reminder that storing a gigabyte of data in the Internet cloud can vary in price from free to US$3.50 per, and that's just what Google charges its customers.

In the coming weeks, Google Docs users will be able to store more of their important files online, where they can access them easily and share them with others, according to a Tuesday post on The Official Google Blog.

At Storage Networking World a couple of weeks ago, the focus was on solid-state drives and cloud technologies.

Remember the early days of PDAs? They revolutionized the concept of a planner by combining calendars, contacts and notes into a compact, easy-to-carry device that could be connected to and synced with your computer.