With the popularity of cloud computing increasing tremendously in recent months and years, software firm Symantec has deemed it wise to roll out a platform for companies wanting to build and manage their storage infrastructure in the cloud.

Company executives recently held a press briefing to formally announce its latest offering called Symantec FileStore, a solution that allows firms to build file-based storage services, including private and public clouds.

Private cloud, as defined by whatis.com, is a term for a proprietary computing architecture that provides hosted services to a limited number of people behind a firewall. A public cloud, on the other hand, is one based on the standard cloud computing model, in which a service provider makes resources, such as applications and storage, available to the general public over the Internet.

Richard Velasco, systems engineering manager for Symantec Philippines, said the storage platform would permit companies to “mix and match” their server hardware to go on to the public cloud or create their own private cloud.

Velasco said the cloud-based storage platform is primarily targeted at organizations, particularly the government and academe, who want to manage their storage infrastructure as they wish with commodity hardware.

Symantec said it currently deploys FileStore as the file-based storage architecture in its own cloud services, with more than 40 petabytes of online storage for more than nine million active users – the largest SaaS storage environment in the world.

With FileStore, Symantec said online backup services could now be obtained at a fraction of the cost of other similar offerings. Organizations can add or remove storage dynamically without taking system offline.

The US-based firm said FileStore also integrates natively with Symantec’s security and information management solutions, including Symantec NetBackup and Symantec Endpoint Protection.

A single FileStore system, it said, scales up to 16 nodes, and 2 PB of total storage. Although these maximums are impressive, the product is designed to scale from entry-level configurations in affordable increments that match the IT organization’s need and budget, the company added.