IBM’s pushed out a major update to its SmartCloud cloud platform offering, adding three new services to round-out the product. They are offered on a per-use case for each running VM and stored data.

IBM SmartCloud Archive is the first, designed for records storage regulatory requirements including eDiscovery. The second is SmartCloud Virtualized Server Recovery, a service that allows customers to restore a VM or a server to a virtual machine in IBM’s cloud or to one of their own servers.

“There are various service levels that will be able to do rapid failovers, mimicking clustering in the physical world with much faster restores and without the hassle of dealing with the customized hardware involved in clustering. The service will be available for Windows, Linux and AIX servers initially.”

The third service, IBM SmartCloud Managed Backup, adds the option to restore a particular server at a point in time and migration from physical to virtual machines to IBM’s existing backup offering.

Earlier this month, IBM launched yet another set of services as a part of its platform – IBM SmartCloud for Education. It includes SaaS decision maangment software that incporoates analytical technology from IBM SPSS, and the IBM Virtual Computing Lab Cloud Solutions for Education. The latter enables an on-premise a private or hybrid cloud.

Cloud recovery solutions developer Asigra and business-building programs MSPexcellence maker are also targeting the cloud backup market. The two companies announced a partnership through which they will jointly develop the Cloud Backup Business Acceleration Program. The program will help MSPs and hosting providers to boost a cloud backup service of their own, based on Asigra technology.

David Smith, Senior Director of Partner Development will be in charge of the team responsible for this program.