The Bradford Report announced a new study today that provides analysis on two of the biggest players in cloud storage: Brocade Communications and NetApp. The report looks into the outlook of this industry, which isn’t all too bad, according to Bradford, and some of the polices we’ve seen in this space when it comes to handling the competition.

“The shift towards cloud computing has ramped up the demand for offsite data storage centers. The rapidly growing demand for data storage has predictably brought lots of competition as well. Larger storage companies have found acquisitions to be a viable way to deal with the uptick in competition.”

Bradford’s report also highlighted that Brocade forecasts revenues in the second quarter this year to range anywhere between $545 million and $555 million – up 9 percent to 11 percent from last year.

Quite a lot of things have been going on in the data storage space this week. That includes DataDirect Networks’ Web Object Scaler (WOS) bagged the first place in the New Product Showcase Award at the International Security Conference. Further, Marvell unveiled the DragonFly Virtual Storage Accelerator (VSA) card in the SNW conference. Set to launch later this year, the product – priced under $2,000/unit – lowers I/O per second by 10 times in servers. Moreover, DragonFly is deployed in individual servers rather than on a storage level, making it pretty attractive to use in private and public cloud infrastructures.

Moving a bit closer to the consumer end, Apple just ordered 12 petabytes worth of data storage from Isilon Systems to better serve iTunes customers. Security software maker AVG is also jumping on the trend, and just introduced its alternative to Box.net and the recently unveiled Amazon Cloud Drive.

Cloud-based storage service LiveKive offers users 25GB worth of online storage for $49.99 per year, and unlimited data capacity for $79.99 per year. LiveKive is a lot more expansive than its alternatives, but on the other hand none of those offers an un limited plan – either way, only time will tell if the security firm’s latest venture will prove to be a good decision.