Wow, is it Friday already? The VAR Guy spent so much time buying flowers and chocolates in anticipation of Valentines' Day that he didn't get to write up all the great news that hit the wires this week. Here's a quick look at some of the stories we wish we had time to talk about in more detail, but couldn't.

Big Switch Networks Launches Freemium Model: Networking solution provider Big Switch Networks recently announced new versions of its Big Monitoring Fabric and Big Cloud Fabric solutions, as well as the launch of its first “freemium” offering, called Big Switch Community.

Big Switch Community is a free to download solution that includes a perpetual license for Big Monitoring Fabric and Big Cloud Fabric for use in lab and development environments, according to the announcement. The offering comes with a single switch and single VM controller pair for Big Monitoring Fabric and one leaf pair and VM controller pair for Big Cloud Fabric, with additional switches and cables available for purchase.

Mike Muñoz named CRO at PernixData: Storage acceleration and management platform developer PernixData has named Mike Muñoz as its new chief revenue officer, responsible for expanding the company’s sales efforts and reaching new customers globally, according to the announcement.

Prior to joining PernixData, Muñoz served as vice president of Worldwide Sales at Nimble Storage, and also worked in leadership positions at companies including Data Domain and NetApp.

"We are thrilled to welcome an accomplished veteran like Mike, who will have an enormous impact on our goal of making PernixData a de facto standard in every virtualized datacenter," said Poojan Kumar, CEO and co-founder of PernixData, in a statement. "Mike has the sales acumen to build a velocity business, much in the same way VMware did in its early years.”  

AppSense Launches DataNow for Windows 10: User environment management solutions provider AppSense released the latest version of its DataNow file sync and migration solution this week, with new features including Windows 10 support, In-Location Sync and the ability to use Shared Group Folders as drive letters, according to the official press release.

“DataNow removes the risk from Windows 10 migration,” said Bassam Khan, vice president of Product Marketing at AppSense. “When our customers migrate users to Windows 10, AppSense enables them to sync all files and settings data from a user’s laptop or desktop and make them instantly available on that user’s new Windows 10 device—without disrupting the user.”

Thycotic Provides Free Privileged Accounts Discovery for Windows:  Privileged account management solution provider Thycotic is offering its Privileged Accounts Discovery for Windows to customers for free, the company announced this week. The solution, which can be downloaded off of Thycotic’s website, allows administrators to automatically view the health of their Windows environments and check to see which passwords are the most susceptible to internal or external threats.

“We believe there is nothing currently available on the market that is comparable to this solution, even among commercial products,” said Nathan Wenzler, executive director of Security at Thycotic. “In order to assist organizations with taking that critical first step to protecting privileged accounts, we are providing this free solution so they can easily discover what’s out there without risk of locking out accounts or changing their IT environments.”

Xerox Names New U.S. Channel Chief: Darren Cassidy has been named president of Xerox’s U.S. Channels Group, effective Jan 1.

Cassidy has worked for Xerox for the past 16 years, and will work to create value for partners as the convergence between digital products and paper-based solutions increases, according to the announcement. He formerly served as managing director of Xerox U.K. before taking on his new role as U.S. channel chief.