This past week has seen a lot of announcements both from start-ups and the biggest players in the industry, further strengthening the cloud’s position on the global scale. Two of the best examples of that are Cloud.com and Gluster, who brought cloud adoption to a whole new level overseas.

Cloud.com announced that its open source multi-tenant IaaS platform, CloudStack, is powering KY ucloud, a public cloud IaaS offering developed by Korea’s largest landline operator and mobile service provider KT. KT ucloud is 60% cheaper that AWS, and already managed to gain a customer base of 500 companies now that it freshly existed a 15 months beta stage.

Another open-source solution pushing the global cloud is Gluster. The company announced its storage solution is used by Swedish web hosting company City Network Hosting to develop the nation’s first IaaS offering – City Cloud.

The open-source cloud is literally accelerating more and more by the day, and Amazon is yet another titan expanding as rapidly as it can manage. This week, the company launched Cloud Drive – a personal cloud storage service similar to Box.net, which puts a special emphasis on music storage. The launch of this new service coincides with the launch of Cloud Player, which Cloud Drive naturally leverages).

Another company who had a product launch this past week was Zetta. The enterprise cloud storage leader launched ZettaMirror 2.0, a high performance storage agent software offering.

On the financial scene, Cisco hopped aboard the acquisition bandwagon. The network behemoth announced it is planning to acquire newScale, a maker of self-service portals for IT organizations. Cisco also launched a completely overhauled version of its data center portfolio including switches, servers and storage networking protocols,, not to mention software. This update delivers a promise Cisco brought to the table years ago, and one that rivals including IBM and Juniper networks haven’t delivered so far.