There’s been some buzz around quite a bit of cloud industries throughout the week, following some big announcements including product updates, acquisitions and more. The first one to take the spotlights is Gluster, developer of the open-source, software-only  GlusterFS storage platform.

Only month after the release of the previous version of its offering, Gluster announced version 3.3 beta 2, introducing support for Hadoop. This means Gluster is now on-par with two of the biggest trends sweeping through the IT industry: big data and the open-source cloud.

Along with its integration with Hadoop, Gluster also added some features to assure customers their data will remain safe, and to match what the competition has to offer.  The company removed the memory limits on Hadoop jobs and volume sizes.

Oracle also had an update. It unveiled Oracle VM 3.0, its push against VMware in the virtualization space. The database giant, normally a company that likes to charge a premium, is apparently very eager to corner vSphere users – its offering VM 4.0 for free, and claims it beats vSphere in just about everything from cost to scalability.

Heading over to Salesforce.com, Syncplicity announced integration with the SaaS. Syncplicity, as the name implies, is a file syncing and storage service that will now enable users to share and backup their files from within Salesforce. This new, near real-time sharing feature represents a major addition to the platform.

Another update that caught our eye this week was Verizon’s acquisition of CloudSwitch. The carrier is investing a lot in the cloud to try and keep up with trends going on in its core businesses as well, and this latest buy will supplement its existing IaaS business. Further, it will also contribute to the company as a whole now that CloudSwitch’s former staff is taking over Verizon’s entire software development operation.