Today we’ve seen two major cloud updates, with open-source storage platform Gluster taking the spotlight. Today the company announced Gluster Virtual Storage Appliances for VMware and Amazon Web Services, hitting general availability as of Feb. 15.  The VMwareVirtual Storage Appliance brings GlusterFS into a VMware virtual machine that can run on any VMware-compatible server platform. Gluster will sell two tiers of subscriptions for the VMware product.

The VMware offering is decoupled from hardware and virtualizes underlying disk and memory resources into a single storage pool with a unified namespace.  The standard VM tier is priced at $4,000 per node, per year; and the AWS product will sell at roughly the same price exclusively via Amazon Marketplace. It runs on an EC2 instance and manages Elastic Block Stores to expand each EBS volume to 2TB. GlusterFS however does enable users to combine volumes into a single pool.

In addition to the Gluster involvement, VMware also made some headlines on its own today. The virtualization leader announced plans to release VMware vCloud Connector in March, and three new service providers offering vCloud certified cloud hosting: BlueLock, Colt and Verizon.  Fujitsu also announced some interesting news today, with the launch of vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) with ETERNUS DX400/DX8000 series disk storage systems. This release introduces the market yet another datacenter virtualization solution.

Going back to earlier Gluster news, we covered that the open-source scale-out storage solutions provider raised $8.5 million in Series B funding. VMware in turn announced VMware Zimbra 7 yesterday, and earlier launched vCloud Accelerator and vCloud Jumpstart.