This week’s News Bits we look at a number of small announcements, small in terms of the content not the impact they have. Cisco enters into agreement to acquire Broadsoft. Commvault announces ScaleProtect with Cisco UCS. Scale Computing and WinMagic partner on HCI security. Kaminario enhances its Clarity platform. Seagate announces 4TB Game Drive for PS4. Paragon Software Group releases Hard Disk Manager Version 16. Spectra Logic announces certified LTO-8 Type M Media and LTO-8 Drives.
This week’s News Bits we look at a number of small announcements, small in terms of the content not the impact they have. Cisco enters into agreement to acquire Broadsoft. Commvault announces ScaleProtect with Cisco UCS. Scale Computing and WinMagic partner on HCI security. Kaminario enhances its Clarity platform. Seagate announces 4TB Game Drive for PS4. Paragon Software Group releases Hard Disk Manager Version 16. Spectra Logic announces certified LTO-8 Type M Media and LTO-8 Drives.
Cisco Enters Into Agreement To Acquire Broadsoft
Cisco announced this week that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Broadsoft. Cisco will pay $55 per share, in cash, in exchange for each share of BroadSoft, or roughly $1.9 billion net of cash, assuming fully diluted shares including conversion of debt. Broadsoft provides a portfolio of cloud collaboration platforms and business applications. The deal is expected to close during the first quarter of the calendar year of 2018.
Commvault Announces ScaleProtect With Cisco UCS
Commvault is working with Cisco to release ScaleProtect with Cisco UCS. As the name implies, this solution will be a combination of Commvault HyperScale Software with Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS). ScaleProtect with Cisco UCS is said to provide a unified, modern data protection and management platform that delivers cloud-like services on-premises, eliminating costly existing point solutions that do not scale and lack visibility into secondary data. The new solution is available now. Benefits include:
- Agility, resiliency and availability of data and applications, both on-premises and in the cloud
- Setup, management and upgrade simplicity
- Commvault Data Platform’s high availability and disaster recovery capabilities, including simply powerful automation, orchestration and self-service
- Powerful new scale-out infrastructure combined with data management and protection, enabling systems consolidation and elimination of point-product solution silos
- Modular scalability to grow with the needs of the business, including non-disruptive capacity and performance expansion
- Built-in resiliency (erasure-coding with no single point of failure)
- Streamlined support, centralized patch management and active monitoring
- Better TCO versus legacy scale-up solutions with lower procurement cost & operational overhead
- Scale-out capacity that can start small and scale to PetaBytes seamlessly
Commvault HyperSclae Solutions
Scale Computing & WinMagic Partner On HCI Security
Scale Computing announced that it is partnering with WinMagic. The partnership brings WinMagic’s CloudVM encryption and intelligent key management solution and combines it with Scale’s high availability HC3 hyperconverged platform. The partnership is further enhanced by the Google Cloud collaboration announced in September.
Kaminario Enhances Its Clarity Platform
Kaminario has enhanced its predictive analytics platform, Clarity. Key enhancements include:
- Seamless Multi-system Management: Single dashboard to manage all Kaminario K2 systems deployed across any number of sites using fine-grained access controls.
- Predictive Capacity and Performance Monitoring: The ability to predict future capacity and performance utilization based on machine learning algorithms analyzing usage patterns.
- Intelligent Service Groups: Clarity’s Intelligent Service Groups allow customers to define and analyze groups of workloads belonging to a specific customer, application or business unit. This functionality allows customers to align storage infrastructure resources to business or application SLAs.
- Predictive Support: The combination of real-time events collected from call-home data and an always evolving rules engine help generate predictive alerts across a wide range of business-critical functions, leading to a new level of automated service experience.
- Support Portal Integration: Kaminario’s Support Portal (now called Clarity Support) features single sign-on integration with the Clarity Analytics environment. Users can seamlessly move from the analytics environment to the support portal for easier case management.
Seagate Announces 4TB Game Drive For PS4
Seagate announced a new Game Drive for Sony’s PlayStation 4. The company has doubled the capacity up to 4TB, which it says results in storing over 100 games. The drive is available now for $129.99
Paragon Software Group Releases Hard Disk Manager Version 16
Paragon Software Group (PSG) announced the release of Hard Disk Manager Version 16. This software is designed to protect, maintain, and manage PC data and despite the name works for SSD and virtual disks as well. Key features:
- Supports Windows 10 Fall Creators Update
- Complete backup strategies save time and effort when configuring regular backup jobs for entire computers, individual volumes, or files
- Fast and safe migrations of Windows OS single partitions or entire disks to new storage devices, even those of smaller capacity
- Easiest, fastest, and most rock-solid drive partitioning of physical and virtual hard disk drives on the market
- Fix most boot issues in a couple of minutes without turning to restore or other advanced actions
- Permanent irreversible data erasure from any storage media type with SSD Trimming and wiping algorithms
- Completely new UI helps manage systems easier than ever
- Define scenario-based backup jobs
- Quick standalone/single time backups
- All wizards redesigned to cover more scenarios
Spectra Logic Announces Certified LTO-8 Type M Media & LTO-8 Drives
Spectra Logic announced that Spectra Certified LTO-8 Type M media along with LTO-8 drives and all supported media are now available for order. Spectra’s LTO-8 Type M converts LTO-7 tape drive to LTO-8, increasing capacity up to 22.5TB compressed. LTO-8 Type M media and LTO-8 drives are expected to ship next month.
