This week, the most noteworthy updates in the cloud came from three areas: storage, cloud services, and the open-source community.

Unquestionably the biggest news this week is the Project Lightning announcement from EMC. The development of a mystery product has been going on since 2010, and this week we’ve learned that it’s in fact an entry into the flash market: the VFCache PCIe card.  It directly challenges some of the larger companies in this industry, mainly Fusion-io, which promptly released a statement with a not unforeseen response to the debut.

Next up is Appcelerator’s acquisition of Cocoafish. The mobile development platform provider has been systematically buying up smaller companies in its field throughout the past 12 months or so, and the latest one is a perfect fit in its portfolio: Cocafish offers an extensive library of add-ons to be used by developers.

The other couple items relate to the  open-source cloud.

OpenStack, the cloud OS initiative originated as a side-project between Rackspace and NASA. has long evolved beyond just that. Cloudscaling revealed the Open Cloud System this week, an operating system based on OpenStack that’s designed for massive, carrier-grade cloud deployments. Alex Williams wrote about the company’s vision and provided the angle on the story in his post – one thing that has easily been established is that Cloudscaling is really pioneering within the OpenStack ecosystem.

The last item in our weekly roundup comes from Red Hat, which made several pushes into the cloud recently, some of which powered by the technology it has acquired as a part of the Gluster merger. The newest product is the Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services, which is exactly what it sounds – a  piece of software that runs NAS in the cloud.