Asigra Inc. has pointed to further evidence showing an increasing use of Software as a Service (SaaS) is on the rise and companies need to examine the issue of data protection. Businesses are continuing to use SaaS more and more with popular applications such as Microsoft Office 365, Google Apps, and Salesforce.com. With the continuing

StorMagic announced a new dashboard plugin that gives full support to VMware vSphere 6.0 as well as tools to monitor health of virtualized storage in VMware deployments. StorMagic’s SvSAN enables businesses to store critical data on remote sites so that they are available at all times, even without the access or need for a company

Unitrends announced the availability of the latest version of the software that powers its physical backup Recovery-Series family as well as its virtual Unitrends Enterprise Backup, Release Version 8.1. This is the first update in six months. Unitrends states that this update will result in up to 50 times faster backup windows, a new Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

Red Hat Inc. announced a preview of its new technology capabilities for OpenStack community’s new Manila project. Red Hat’s Gluster Storage now provides enterprises with a scale-out shared file system service for OpenStack cloud infrastructures. These capabilities expand the options for hybrid cloud storage.

Today Permabit Technology Corporation and NEC Corporation of America announced a partnership aimed at delivering data efficiency solutions. Combining Permabit’s Albireo data efficiency software with NEC M-Series SAN storage systems will deliver new solutions such as deduplication and compression to NEC’s SAN systems.

Today EMC Corporation announced that it has released two new OpenStack solutions. EMC first announced work on these solutions last November with its announcement of OpenStack Reference Architecture Program. EMC built these solutions in close collaboration with Canonical and Mirantis.

Today Nexenta announced the general availability of its hyper-scale scale-out object storage management software, NexentaEdge. NexentaEdge is the first and only software-only scale out storage solution that delivers inline deduplication and compression. Nexenta will be demonstrating this new software May 19, at the OpenStack Summit in Vancouver.

Google announced today that it was lowering pricing on Google Compute Engine Instance types. Google states that it is already 40% less expensive than other cloud providers on many workloads. Google is also introducing a new class of preemptible virtual machines. These new VMs will deliver short-term capacity for low costs.

Axcient announced that it is extending its Recovery as a Service (RaaS) to laptops and desktops through its new offering, Direct To Cloud. This new offering allows organizations to replicate their entire physical and virtual servers to the cloud without a local appliance.