EMC is announcing its acquisition of Aveksa Inc. which is a privately held company focused on Identity and Access Management (IAM), with the results effective immediately as Aveksa will operate within EMC’s security division called RSA as part of RSA’s Identity Trust Management product group. Terms of the deal were not disclosed at the time

SanDisk has announced an agreement to acquire SMART Storage Systems, which is known for its innovative SAS and SATA interface SSDs and Guardian Technology, for a sum of $307 million in cash and equity-based incentives. The acquisition has been approved by both boards of directors, and pending regulatory review, the deal is expected to be

CA ARCserve D2D for Linux is a quick backup and restore software that complements CA’s existing ARCserve D2D for Microsoft Windows, producing a complete solution for today’s heterogeneous environments. By providing fast, frequent backups and flexible recovery with built-in data security, ARCserve D2D facilitates both data security and disaster recovery for physical and virtual servers.

Toshiba is announcing a new capacity for its automotive SATA HDD which now offers up to 320GB of storage and is optimized to handle a wide range of operating environments. Part of the MQ01AADxxxC series, the Toshiba MQ01AAD032C automotive HDD multiplies Toshiba’s previous highest capacity offering by more than 1.5 times. The automotive HDD does this

WD is announcing its fourth generation Arkeia appliances which are backup and recovery solutions designed for SMBs that feature updated WD Arkeia 10.1 software. New in the v10.1 software is seed and feed technology that supports hybrid cloud backups so that organizations can move backups offsite via replication instead of shipping tapes. On top of that, the

EMC is announcing updates to its Syncplicity file sync and share software which is designed to simplify file sharing across the enterprise. The new enhancements allow intuitive sending of files without needing to attach them to emails, which sometimes have limitations on file size and types of attachments. Users can utilize the Syncplicity Secure Send directly

WD and sTec are announcing a merger whereby HGST, a subsidiary of WD, will acquire sTec for $340 million in cash – which is $6.85/share. sTec has long been an innovator in enterprise SSDs (such as the s840 that we’ve reviewed), and the acquisition cost represents roughly $207 million in enterprise value. Leading up to

Sepaton is announcing their version 7.1 of its software for S2100-ES3 purpose-built backup appliances (PBBA) which are an enterprise-class data protection platforms. Version 7.1 now includes functionality that enables administrators to backup and deduplicate data using Symantec NetBackup OpenStorage (OST) over Fibre Channel which adds to existing IP connectivity. Also updated, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager

Fusion-io is announcing a large-scale upgrade to its unified virtualization software ioTurbine which features hypervisor caching, virtualization-aware caching in guest VMs, dynamic reallocation of cache memory during live migration of VMs in VMware vMotion, and unified management of caching across virtual and physical environments. ioTurbine enables IT administrators to more easily deploy and future proof