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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.

It's almost impossible to believe now, but when Microsoft premiered its Windows Azure service back in October 2008, there was genuine speculation over whether the company would try to muscle its way into the cloud the way it did with Internet Explorer during the war with Netscape. What was the hook? What Windows service or feature would be so irresistible that would require Azure, that no other competitor would be able to gain a footing?

Most conspiracy theories seem stupid three years or so later, after they've failed to come to fruition. Now that Amazon is the leader (albeit amid good competition) in cloud-based virtual machines, VMware is the leader in virtualization services for the enterprise (with Citrix keeping it on its toes), Salesforce (it's still amazing to say it) has become the leader in cloud-based applications, and Heroku (a Salesforce product) is believed to be within striking distance of leadership in cloud-based apps platforms, it becomes not only feasible but practical to consider Azure in terms of relevance.

GlusterFS was introduced back in 2007, as an open source network-attached storage system that used Ethernet or InfiniBand RDMA to pool together multiple storage volumes into one colossal pool. It became a cloud storage system in 2009, meaning that it added the elasticity and self-service provisioning necessary to qualify for the official "cloud" moniker. And although it was designed for enterprises, that didn't stop some very clever coders from reworking it into a locally-mountable cloud storage store, now called HekaFS.

Last October, Red Hat acquired Gluster, the file system's parent, for $126 million in cash. Today, the New England-sounding name is no more, but the vision lives on under the unsurprising name Red Hat Software Appliance.

The question among both cloud computing consumers and supercomputer clients alike has been when the distinction between the little cloud and the big iron would disappear. Apparently that boundary evaporated several months ago. In its twice-annual survey of big computer power, the University of Mannheim has reported that Amazon's EC2 Compute Cluster - the same one you and I can rent space and time on today - performs well enough to be ranked #42 among the world's Top 500 supercomputers.

How far down is #42? In terms of time, not far at all. When EC2 was but a gleam in Jeff Bezos' eye, Los Alamos National Laboratory's BlueGene/L was king. Now, the 212,992-core beast ranks #22. Roadrunner, the amazing hybrid made up of 122,400 of both IBM Power and AMD Opteron cores, sits in #11. Meanwhile, EC2 - whose makeup is a little of this and a little of that - has achieved #42 status with only 17,024 cores.

WordPress has grown by leaps and bounds from its origins as a personal blogging platform. Despite the evidence, though, a lot of folks view WordPress as a CMS that's exclusively for blogs or small sites. So what if I told you eMusic is moving to WordPress for all its CMS needs? That's exactly what Scott Taylor talked about this year at WordCamp San Francisco.

Now, eMusic isn't the world's biggest site, but it's nothing to sneeze at either. It serves around 6 million visits per month and "billions of HTTP requests" and millions of page views. The site has 400,000 subscribers. If it can handle eMusic, odds are it can handle your site as well.

If you have a Red Hat or CentOS server in your data center and you have been itching to try out one of the public cloud services, then be one of the first 100 people to try out this new migration tool from Racemi today. Click on this link here and set up a free account. You have your choice of clouds on Amazon EC2, GoGrid, Rackspace, or Terremark. If you miss the offer, Racemi will only charge for successful migrations.

If you've been wanting to experiment with the NoSQL graph database Neo4j, but have been too lazy to figure out how to install it, then have we got the thing for you. OpenCredo, a UK consultancy delivery partner for Neo4j developers Neo Technology, has released an Amazon Web Services AMI (Amazon Machine Instance) for Neo4j.

OpenCredo's AMI is avialbale in all five availability regions.

Rasmus Andersson, developer of sites such as Dropular and Spotnicc, has created a template for setting up an Amazon EC2 instance for running Node.js or other Web applications. You can use it save time setting up and deploying virtual servers while experimenting with new ideas.

The steps are outlined here and the template can be found Github here. It seems like a handy way to get up and running with Node.js.

Last month Gartner released its Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service and Web Hosting. The report positioned AT&T, Rackspace, Savvis, Terremark and Verizon as the leaders. Controversially, Amazon.com didn't make the cut as a leader partially because it doesn't offer certain features such as managed hosting or options for hybrid clouds. Amazon.com and many of the other providers ranked are focused on developers and on providing web services, not hosting virtualized enterprise applications such as ERP.

Yesterday we reported that Wikileaks' web site suffered a denial of service (DOS) attack just before the publication of its most recent cache of documents. The site was down for only a few hours, according to Forbes' Andy Greenberg.

Today, The Guardian reports that Wikileaks turned to Amazon.com's Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) service to get back online and survive the DOS attack.