Cloud start-ups seem to be popping out from everywhere these days, and they’re bringing with them a great deal of innovation matching the biggest names in the industry. The first and perhaps most notable start-up we’ll highlight is Tintri, founded by Kieran Harty who helped develop VMware’s virtulization technology. The start has a new product, about the size of a suitcase, which reportedly solved the VM stall with a new product and works like a giant USB thumb drive at roughly 1/6 of the cost of standard systems.

From Business Week:

“The system combines flash memory, standard hard drives, and sophisticated compression technology to perform data triage. The most in-demand information goes on the high-speed flash memory, the rest to slower hard drives.”

Tintri already got a few satisfied customers, including software maker Tibco and North West Group, a company which produces satellite imagery for the oil & gas industry as well as other areas.

Tintri is a cloud start-up with a lot of potential founded by an industry veteran, but it’s not the only one belonging to this category. Stealth startup CloudFloor announced a $3 million initial round of funding. Founded by former Gomez Inc. and Compuware execs Jaime Ellertson and Imad Mouline, it’s most likely the start-up is aiming towards the cloud applications performance testing space.

Another cloud start-up who recently raised some funding is DotCloud, a PaaS start-up who secured $10 million from Benchmark Capital and Trinity Ventures. DotCloud’s offerings resemble a hybrid PaaS-SaaS environment, which makes it fairly unique in the cloud services space. The freshly founded Zenoss is also pushing its cloud services with the launch of Zenoss Datacenter Insight, a real-time cloud analytics service covering everything from social media trends to datacenter information. The offering represents a major addition to Zenoss’ already impressive portfolio – and not just in start-up standards.