Big data marketplace operator (and app maker) Infochimps is now up-to-date with two of the most buzzed-about trends in IT.

This week Rackspace announced that about two years after it fired up the OpenStack project with the support of NASA and a few others, their Rackspace Cloud – the company’s flagship service – is now powered by the young project. In that two-year period OpenStack has seen a total of five releases and hundreds of partners.

The cloud OS’s achievement list managed to grow even longer immediately after Rackspace’s announcement, when Infochimps revealed it now supports the former’s hosting service via the OpenStack API. This is another push on behalf of the Hadoop ecosystem into the cloud; the big data munching engine can now be deployed on yet another platform (see the video here).

“Rackspace customers running the new OpenStack-based Rackspace Cloud Servers can quickly and easily spin up Hadoop clusters to power their big data applications in as little as 20 minutes with a single command using the Infochimps Platform. With the power of Ironfan, Infochimps’ open source provisioning tool, and Dashpot, Infochimps’ visualization and operations dashboard, customers can easily monitor and manage their Big Data operations on an ongoing basis, or leave it to Infochimps to manage it on the Rackspace Cloud for them.”

Dashpot is a pretty new addition to Infochimps’ portfolio. It was launched just last week, dubbed as a tool that runs on top of Platform and supplements it with the addition of several elements. Among these are some pretty extensive (real-time) visualization features that make data available in a simplified format far and beyond just the IT department. In addition, Dashpot also rounds out usability and cloud management in the admin panel, making itself a welcomed addition there as well.