Cloud storage and data protection provider CTERA Networks has partnered with Caringo Inc., a well-known object storage provider, to bring Caringo’s storage smarts to CTERA customers. Such partnerships are nothing new for CTERA — VP of of Marketing Rani Osnat noted the company already has partnered with Amazon, Rackspace and Scality, among others, to support more storage platforms and to expand the breadth of solutions CTERA clients can use.

“We don’t want to limit our partners on storage choice,” Osnat said.

So what makes the partnership with Caringo so unique? The deal calls for the companies to integrate CTERA’s Cloud Attached Storage gateways and CTERA Customer Portal with Caringo‘s CAStor object storage software. The result, according to CTERA, will be a “full-featured, market-ready cloud storage solution.”

“MSPs and cloud service providers want to invest in scalable cloud storage solutions,” Osnat said when detailing the importance of CTERA’s partnership with Caringo. In a prepared statement,  Liran Eshel, CTERA Networks CEO and co-founder, said Caringo adds the best object storage platform on the market to the CTERA solution.

“Their [Caringo’s] highly automated approach, combined with our cloud storage gateways, enables a cloud storage solution that can easily grow and deliver protection and file sharing with LAN-speed performance and end-to-end security,” Eshel said.

Osnat made it clear that CTERA is nowhere near finished when it comes to signing partnerships and adding support for more types of cloud storage platforms. “We want to support as many platforms as we can,” he said. Additional partnerships before the end of the 2011 calendar year are unlikely, but Osnat hinted we can expect to hear more cloud storage platform support news from CTERA in January 2012.