Xeround, an SQL Database-as-a-service provider for private and public clouds, has a new offering is available for Rackspace. Xeround’s vendor-agnostic solution, is now capable of running on cloud environment regardless of the service provider, thus enabling users to avoid vendor lock-in and migrate applications at will.  It’s a direction Xeround’s become known for, and it’s only fitting that they’d expand on this ideal, adding Rackspace to its growing number of supported cloud services.

“Xeround has many users running on Rackspace that have requested Rackspace support – this announcement serves to meet the demand Xeround already sees in the market.”

The addition of support for the Rackspace Cloud is a huge milestone for Xeriound’s SQL DaaS offering, which until now ran only on Amazon EC2 and the Heroku platform-as-a-service, favored by Ruby developers. The offering for Rackspace will initially be available in a U.S-only limited beta, and the fully integrated service is expected to debut in the United Kingdom in a couple of months.

In addition to this announcement, Xeround also revealed its new auto-scaling functionality to its DaaS offering, targeting SQL-based applications. To date, Xeround only offered on-demand scalability for its cloud database users. Now however the company will be the first company to offer robust elasticity with automatic rule-based scaling for MySQL databases in the cloud.

It was not so long ago when Xeround announced the launch of its Heroku add-on. Over at the Amazon cloud, the news of the recently launched MySQL for the Cloud, a multi-geographic cloud database making a user’s service available on Amazon in Europe and North America.

While Xeround makes advances with new products and cloud developments, other cloud and network companies are struggling with direction, no longer as nimble as the uprising of startups.  In light of Cisco’s big changes, which involve laying off 550 employees, Cloudera announced the general availability of Cloudera Distribution Including Apache Hadoop v3, or CDH3. This latest version is integrated with no less than 7 supporting programs, offers better performance as well as enhanced security and a host of other functions.