This past week in the cloud had its fair share of news and updates, especially when it comes to open cloud initiatives. This field has become so attractive it not only spurred OpenStack and a number of other major presences, but also attracted VMware in the picture. The virtulization’s giant open-source PaaS offering, Cloud Foundry, is still in beta, and has seen its first major outages this week.

Cloud Foundry has experienced two outages over the course of the two days. The first one blocked developer access for a few hours, while the second longer one completely disconnected customers even though all their networks and applications were still running normally.

This week, Red Hat also had some open source PaaS news. The company launched Openshift, a Cloud Foundry competitor which offers support for a broad spectrum of languages and is integrated with a number of other offerings. Openshift is built on the Deltacloud cloud interoperability standard, which is shared by IBM, Amazon and a number of other major service providers with the status of Red Hat Certified Public Cloud Provider.

In addition to Red Hat’s launch of Openshift, EMC had a product launch of its own. While not as big as its record-breaking event held last year, the storage giant launched a number of new offerings designed to automate and optimize performance in virtualized environments.

Going back to virtualization and VMware, the company introduced an integration of its vCenter Orchestrator tool with Microsoft Active Directory.

Over on the big data analytics front, mBlast, a developer of cloud-based marketing metrics tools, released a free version of its mPact offering. mPact is a web app which aggregates tremendous amounts data from social networks, blogs and webpages, and then applies selected keywords to determine who are the influencers and how big and significant is their presence on the web.