We have been big fans of Nimbula since the company launched a few years ago with its hybrid cloud management tools. Today they announced their latest version, which adds new functionality and orchestration features. It will directly support VMware's ESXi hypervisor and Cloud Foundry services, making it easier for customers to orchestrate the provisioning and monitoring of cloud-based applications.

One thing you don't quite get accustomed to in reporting developments in cloud technology is how even the virtual things become virtualized. Last December, Red Hat released a software storage appliance based on the GlusterFS software-based NAS system that Red Hat acquired in October. That product is a way to apply the same methodology that GlusterFS customers used to build network-attached storage pools completely from existing storage.

That product had been described as a "virtual storage appliance" - in fact, it was given that name in Red Hat graphs we used. Today, Red Hat announced the, um, virtual version of that, for use in pooling elastic storage from Amazon Elastic Block Storage.

Today, Alfresco today launches its Enterprise v4, perhaps the biggest update since they began operations. The new software comes with mobile and tablet apps, business app integrations and is loaded with social features that help users share, comment on and collaborate on content. The software is built around an open source content management system that is used by more than 2500 enterprises in 55 countries around the globe. They call it cloud connected content.

Like other social Intranet products, Alfresco users can like or follow particular content streams. Enterprise v4 has integrated connectors to Google Docs, Microsoft Office, QuickOffice, Adobe Creative Suite and Apple's iWork app. You can also publish your content to YouTube, SlideShare, Twitter, Facebook and Flickr.

Pricing for an Alfresco Enterprise subscription starts at about $25k for the typical enterprise. You can download the new software here.

HP began its OpenStack-based Cloud Services this month, and there is a lot of promise but not much in the way of actual implementation yet. HP intends its cloud to cover both public and hybrid uses. Initially, the beta is free of charge although you will need to provide a credit card number for authentication (you won't be charged anything while the beta is underway).

We haven't written much about TIBCO's enterprise social media tool tibbr since a year ago. But they have interesting news, including updates to the service, that they are announcing today with v3.5, scheduled to be available next month.

Last month, we introduced you to a cloud-based backup system called CTERA - a practical demonstration of the flexibility of the underlying object storage platform. That platform, called CAStor, is essentially a mapping system for files stored over a widely distributed pool of clusters in the cloud. CAStor takes care of where things are located in the cloud; applications like CTERA map those locations using systems that make sense to humans.

Today, the company behind CAStor - Austin, Texas-based Caringo Inc. - altered the definition of "things" in that context, with the introduction to its customers of CAStor version 5.5. With the help of a little process learned from Web mechanics called chunked encoding, data centers will become able to store widely distributed chunks of files up to 4 TB in total length. It's part of Caringo's latest effort to squash RAID using the cloud as its weapon.

Two technologies have made the quantum speed leaps in high-performance computing possible. One is the rapid ascent of commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) processors that made computing speed cheaper. The second is InfiniBand (IB), the switching technology that Sun Microsystems helped evolve into a fabric - the underlying infrastructure of a carrier-grade cloud.

Today, after an on-again, off-again relationship with InfiniBand that stretches back to its very beginning, Intel is back in the networking fabric business in a big way. With as big a message of "we're back" as you can send, the company has agreed to purchase the InfiniBand production assets, along with many of the employees, of QLogic. Analysts estimate the company to be the #2 player in the InfiniBand switch market with over one-fourth the global market. The deal has a reported value of $125 million.

In a move to stay competitive in a cloud landscape that looked to be blowing it away, Microsoft this morning is making important strategic shifts that could advance its position in a two-front war against both VMware and Amazon. Today the company is making available a release candidate for its System Center 2012 administrative suite, which will utilize a new fabric controller (FC) for private cloud architectures.

This new FC will be hypervisor-agnostic. Up until today, Microsoft's private cloud product was called "Hyper-V Cloud," and was centered around the Hyper-V hypervisor. Today, as the company's corporate vice president tells ReadWriteWeb, the new SC 2012 Datacenter edition will feature a completely renovated, simplified licensing model, now supporting unlimited virtual machines for the same, flat fee.

Back last summer, Virsto announced the beta support of vSphere for what it is now calling its storage hypervisor. That has now been released, along with a second version of its HyperV product. Both Virsto products automatically thin provision your storage repositories, and also make your storage vastly scalable and easier to replicate, backup and clone.

If there was any doubt that Box.net has become a solid enterprise cloud provider, today's announcement of various security features, coupled with a boost to unlimited storage for all of its Enterprise accounts, should dispel them. Starting today, all Box Enterprise accounts will have unlimited storage for unlimited number of users. The Box Business accounts will double in size to a 1TB limit.

Box will also work with Intel's Expressway Cloud Access 360 single sign-on service for better user authentication, provisioning and policy management of their accounts. This integration will also provide two-factor authentication with one-time passwords before a user can login to their Box account. Box will also sync with Active Directory so that groups and users can be automatically populated inside the Box account. This makes it easier on admins as well as makes the Box system more secure: admins can eliminate terminated users' accounts quickly.

But wait, there is more. Two other security features will be rolled out in the next week that include smart shared links and improved trusted access. The former makes it easier to limit access to who can view a file to users inside a company domain, giving it more granularity (something that Box' competitors have had already). The latter expands trusted access to track logins from mobile devices and custom apps that are connecting via the Box API. IT admins can limit the number of devices that an employee can access from the same ID.