This past week in big data has been a pretty exciting one, with some product launches and a milestone acquisition by VMware.

First up is Cloudera, which is not exactly new to the big data business. It did, however, jump on the announcement bandwagon earlier this week with the roll out of CDH4, its fourth open source distribution of Hadoop.

Most of the effort has gone into improving the ecosystem of tools and frameworks that support the data munching engines rather than Hadoop itself–HBase and MapReduce have all been improved and data compression got a performance boost. In addition some of the less known apps received an update as well – Flume, Sqoop, Hue and others just as colorfully-named.

Next is VMware, the virtualization solutions maker that’s gotten involved with the cloud, mobile, and now big data. We’ve learned this week that they’ve acquired Cetas Software for an undisclosed amount, a Silicon Valley firm that offers a Hadoop-based platform that runs on Amazon Web Services, that is vSphere-virtualized instances.

IBM also made a big data buy this week – the Vivisimo merger. It’s a company that deals with enterprise search and the aggregation of various types of data based on relevant categories.  The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Last but not least in in this week’s recap is hardware vendor NetApp. It gave its SANtricity storage platform an overhaul in an effort to make the E-Series line more attractive to enterprises handling data-driven workloads: thin provisioning and snapshots have been added, in addition to integration with VMware and several other functions such as centralized LUN configuration.  NetApp promises that these improvements can directly contribute to a sizable performance increase.