This week featured the 2012 Dell Storage Forum, an annual gathering that, this year, represented a very solid commitment to storage on behalf of the vendor.  The company backed this strategic shift with a number of product announcements.

Dell announced a number of new solutions including the M1000e rack, an all-in-one box that couples PowerEdge servers with networking tech from subsidiary Force 10. Compellent  also got its share of the limelight thanks to the introduction of a data center system that incorporates the same technologies as the M1000e, plus Compellent storage.

Dell’s gathering is one of the biggest highlights for this week, certainly for the vendor, but it wasn’t the only conference held in the past few days. The Hadoop Summit kicked off on Wednesday and brought with it a number of big data developments, including some that tie in with the cloud.

NetApp debuted the Open Solution for Hadoop Rack, an E-Series platform that consolidates storage, network and compute in the same chassis similarly to Dell’s new products. The big difference, and the heart of the value prop, however, is that as the name would suggest, the bundle is optimized for Hadoop.

Cisco jumped on the convergence bandwagon as well with the disclosure of an agreement with Fusion-io to  integrate its flash technology with the networking giant’s Unified Computing System (UCS) lineup.

Over in the mobile space, Android developers got access to an emerging new service that shows a lot of premise. Applicasa is a startup that went out of stealth just a few months ago with a web based service that takes care of the server-side scripting as well as some of the content management that is involved with the development of a mobile app. Yesterday it expanded beyond iOS.