NetApp and Microsoft announced a new three-year agreement that deepens product collaboration and technical integration and extends joint sales and marketing activities to customers worldwide. Under the agreement, the two companies will collaborate and deliver solutions that span virtualization, private cloud computing, and storage and data management.

— QLogic’s 5802V 8Gbps Fibre Channel switches and iSR6250 10GbE Intelligent Storage Routers are now available from Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) and its resellers. The switches and routers are qualified with Hitachi’s storage systems, including the Universal Storage Platform (USP) V and the midrange Adaptable Modular Storage 2000 family.

— Ferrari has selected Emulex’s FCoE-based OneConnect Universal Converged Network Adapters (UCNAs) for use in Verari’s data center platforms. The adapters are shipping with Verari’s Forest Container solutions. Emulex’s UCNAs support hardware protocol offload for TCP/IP, iSCSI, and FCoE.

— Enhance Technology has announced support for Hitachi’s Ultrastar 2TB 7200RPM hard disk drives (HDDs) across the Enhance portfolio of storage systems. The 2TB HDDs increase capacities of the company’s 8 disk desktop and rackmount storage arrays to 16TB and as much as 32TB on its flagship 16-disk UltraStor Professional Storage Systems. The UltraStor Professional Storage System is expandable to 160TB through SAS storage expansion.

— Disaster recovery specialist Axxana announced that its Phoenix System RP Enterprise Data Recorder (EDR) – a so-called “black box” for disaster recovery and business continuity – will be available in January 2010 through the EMC Select program. The Axxana Phoenix System RP EDR works with EMC RecoverPoint and EMC Clariion networked storage systems to send data asynchronously to remote sites, while the Phoenix System RP EDR solution protects a synchronous copy of data at the primary site.

— 3PAR announced 3PAR Policy Advisor for Dynamic Optimization, new software that adds further autonomic policy management and automation capabilities to 3PAR Dynamic Optimization for 3PAR InServ Utility Storage Servers. Policy Advisor analyzes how the InServ’s virtual volumes use physical disk space. The software then automatically makes non-disruptive adjustments for optimal volume distribution and storage tiering across storage server resources.

— Symantec’s security and enterprise storage management products are now available through the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Specifically, Symantec Endpoint Protection and Veritas Storage Foundation Basic are now available on Amazon EC2. Businesses can leverage the Symantec solutions to add additional protection to their Windows servers in the cloud with comprehensive threat prevention and manage their cloud storage online with a single toolset, according to the company.

— Atempo is now supporting Mac OS X Snow Leopard across its product line of data protection and archiving products. Customers using Snow Leopard can now have their digital assets backed up and protected with Atempo Time Navigator and Atempo Live Backup, their archival data preserved with Atempo Digital Archive (ADA) and their archived emails accessible through the Atempo Digital Archive for Messaging (ADAM) Entourage plug-in.

— LaCie has released a new NAS and iSCSI appliance. The LaCie 12big Rack Network is built on an Intel server-class motherboard that features two 1GBps Ethernet links and a quad-core Xeon processor. The 12big Rack Network features a hardware RAID controller (RAID 0, 1, 10, 5, 50, and 6), redundant power supplies, and multiple hot-swappable cooling fans. The system is pre-configured with Windows Storage Server 2008 Standard Edition running on two RAID 1-protected internal 2.5″ disks. The LaCie 12big Rack Network is available in various capacities through the LaCie Online Store for a retail price of $7,999.