The main highlight of this week’s cloud roundup is storage wars, an area that we’ve been covering extensively.  Hewlett-Packard in particular has had a few very interesting developments lately, namely the newest ProLiant server, and now it plans to put flash into it.

Gen8 is the result of a massive R&D effort, and equally formidable is EMC’s VFCache, the official product name for what has been known as ‘Project Lightning’ for quite some time before launch.  Now HP is retaliating with its own flash development.

“Our understanding is that a Smart Storage engineering unit inside HP is producing a ProLiant server flash cache and software that will be integrated with back-end arrays,” reads a report from The Register.  “The end-to-end and tiered storage channel will operate in a co-ordinated way so that as data gets progressively hotter it moves up the tiers and, as it cools, it moves down them.”

Hewlett-Packard invested several hundreds of millions of dollars in the creation of Gen8, and this latest project will undoubtedly cost a lot of company resources as well. But HP’s R&D budget reminds very small compared to its competitors, due mostly to cost cutting initiatives by former CEO Mark Hurd. This is turning into a reason for concern, and the burden has fallen into Meg Whiteman’s lap.

At the same time, Dell is also competing with its latest PowerEdge box and the rest of its massive portfolio. This aggressive approach towards the data center also extends into networking, with updates such as the company’s recent certification of certain QLogic gear.

Over in the Services space, Amazon teamed up with Eucalyptus for a hybrid cloud offering, enabling customers to offload workloads from their own data centers to AWS.