Houston-based The Planet, a provider of IT hosting services, announced an expansion into the cloud storage business. The Planet said it will offer its customers the ability to access an on-demand storage cloud service powered by Nirvanix. The Planet said the new cloud storage offering will initially be offered to its existing hosting customers, with access for non-hosted, storage-only customers becoming available in the first quarter. Cloud storage allows customers to store data on the Internet via Web APIs, without having to install and maintain their own hardware; The Planet's offering will be priced according to the amount of storage used.