Alongside the announcements coming out of Hadoop World 2011, this past week features several updates from the cloud industry as well.

The first highlight is an update from OpenStack. Rackspace will be handing over control of the open cloud OS initiative to a dedicated foundation in 2012, but the cloud host still intends on remaining a key part of it s ecosystem. The company’s latest project is a private cloud based on the latest Diablo release: Rackspace Cloud: Private Edition is designed to support medium-to-large deployments, Alex Williams points out, and has a very solid services angle.

Amazon Web Services also had a development this week. The retail giant’s cloud business is opening up its fourth datacenter in the U.S, and seventh globally, in Boardman along the Columbia River. Towns bordering the river have become a popular location for datacenter thanks to more economic water cooling, courtesy of Mother Nature.

In other cloud infrastructure news, VCE partnered with SAP to run its BI applications on customer deployments, as well as to form a long-term relationship powered by its global technology partner status. VCE is a venture-backed startup that provides a new “cloud-in-a-box” offering, which saves customers some of the usual deployment costs and makes the team-up equally significant on SAP’s end.

In addition to outward expansions and partnerships, the weekly executive shuffle hasn’t been left out either. This time it was storage and backup solutions vendor FalconStor, which hired a new CFO, and appointed two new heads of marketing and a vice president of operations. The staffing changes were announced over the weekend, after the company held its earnings call last week and managed to meet Wall Street’s expectations rather accurately.