Storage giant EMC is investing a lot in staying up to date with all the major shifts going on in the cloud, and of these areas are the open source cloud and data analytics. A few hours ago we’ve learned that the company entered into a licensing agreement with MapR. As part of this agreement, MapR will develop Hadoop-based software which will be integrated into EMC’s Greenplum data analytics appliances and own Hadoop distribution. This distribution, the EMC Greenplum HD Enterprise Edition, was released back at the EMC World 2011 conference held a few weeks ago.

“Silicon Valley-based MapR said in a statement on Wednesday that the technology it has developed on top of Hadoop allows it to eliminate single points of failure, allow snapshots for data protection and recovery, and dramatically raise the performance of the basic Hadoop framework.”

In September, EMC struck an agreement with Cloudera, a prominent commercial distributor of Hadoop, to integrate the latter’s distribution with the Greenplum Chorus platform.

In addition to its team up with MapR, EMC also announced a new storage offering. Based on its new VNX midrange storage systems, the offering is reportedly designed to support the simultaneous booting of up to 1,000 Citrix XenDesktop virtualized desktops. EMC’s FAST Cache technology is leveraged to automatically scale the system to up to 2 terabytes. Eric Herzog, vice-president of product marketing and management for unified storage at EMC, said that the new solution is designed to help companies deal with the “boot storm,” the time in the morning when thousands of workers boot their desktops at the same time.

This latest development from EMC can be considered as good news for Citrix, which is holding its annual Citrix Synergy conference. The company had some major developments lately, including a first investment in SMB VDI, and a mobile app update.