This week’s News Bits we look at a number of small announcements, small in terms of the content not the impact they have. ioFABRIC releases Vicinity 3.0. SwiftStack Hybrid Cloud Software is validated on Cisco UCS S3260. Druva raises another $80 million in funding. Actifio joins Ready for IBM Storage Program. Synology releases Surveillance Station 8.1.

Today VMware Inc. reported its second quarter 2018 earnings. VMware continues to be one of the top players in the HCI field and looks to stay there with today’s announcement. Going into VMworld 2017, VMware is not only announcing some good numbers, but it looks likely to surpass the milestone of 10,000 customers for vSAN.

Today Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., announced the release of Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) RS series. The new UCP RS series is a fully integrated, software-defined data center (SDDC) rack-scale platform, powered by VMware Cloud Foundation. The big benefits to customers that the UCP RS provides is quicker

Today Hedvig announced the latest release of its software-defined storage (SDS) platform, Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform version 3.0. The latest update contains innovations including end-to-end integrations, advanced security capabilities, and enhancements to the platform’s comprehensive suite of caching technologies. According to Hevig, these new capabilities will enable customers to store and protect virtualized, containerized, and

Today IBM announced a new data protection software that it states is easy to set up, easy to manage and helps simplify data recovery, IBM Spectrum Protect Plus. The new software can be set up in under an hour providing protection for data in cloud, virtualized, and data center environments.

Today Western Digital Corporation (WDC) launched what it is calling the world’s highest capacity external desktop storage system, the updated My Book Duo. With upwards of 20TB of capacity, the new My Book Duo can give both consumers and most professionals the storage they need for their ever-expanding digital content libraries. The new RAID storage

Today SolarWinds announced that it has made significant updates and enhancements to its SolarWinds Orion Platform and its systems management product portfolio. The enhanced products in the portfolio include SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor, SolarWinds Virtualization Manager, SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor, and SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor. The goal of these updates and enhancements is to enable

Today Zerto released that latest version of its Zerto Virtual Replication, version 5.5 or ZVR 5.5. With this release, Zerto is introducing Microsoft Azure bi-directional replication, faster AWS recovery, and Zerto Analytics capabilities to gain IT environment insights. ZVR 5.5 provides replication and recovery of enterprise applications, both to and from cloud environments adding to

Today Cisco announced its intent to acquire the hyperconvergence software company, Springpath, Inc. Cisco will acquire the company for $320 million in cash and assumed equity awards, plus additional retention-based incentives. The acquisition is expected to close in Cisco's first quarter of fiscal year 2018, following customary closing conditions and regulatory review.