This past week in the cloud featured a handful of updates from the biggest segments in the industry, first of all from the open-source segment.  Yahoo spun off their Hadoop business, launching Hortonworks. The new branch, backed by Benchmark capital, is taking on the enterprise sector, joining companies like Cloudera in offering their own renditions of Hadoop-based services.

It was a big week for Hadoop, actually, as Cloudera had a major enterprise update of its own.  There were several other Hadoop-related announcements that came out of the Hadoop Summit this week, from Karmasphere to Pervasive Software.  GoldenOrb is another notable launch, launching its own big data analysis tool based on Hadoop’s open-source platform.

Another major area of development this week was the storage market. Oracle announced its latest acquisition, storage solutions provider Pillar Data Systems. Pillar was majority-owned by Oracle head Larry Ellison, and offers scalable SAN block I/O storage systems. Pillar technology is running in 1500 or so systems operated by some 600 customers.

The Pillar deal is big news, but it seems that this week’s storage headline comes from IBM. The company announced that it has developed a new kind of memory chip. It features phase-changing memory, as it’s called, and can record data 100 times faster than it’s present-day alternative, changing from crystal phase to an amorous phase through electrical voltage or pulses. IBM managed to put four bits in a single cell, and this technology may be hitting the market within a few years.

The storage market is not lacking in terms of competition. Nirvanix for example is yet another innovator in this field, and got itself a new key executive. Paul Froutan is leaving Google where he served as head of global data center infrastructure to become Nirvanix’s CTO.

Back to the open-source cloud space: DreamHost extended its support for OpenStack, Rackspace’s joint open cloud OS initiative with NASA and about 50 other contributors, through Ceph integration. Ceph is the web storage company’s open source distributed data storage platform.

Moving away from the enterprise sphere, the personal cloud represents an equally expanding market. A recent report suggests that personal cloud services may transform into a $12 billion market by 2016. This is thanks to Microsoft, Apple, Google and the countless other companies that innovate and compete against each other in an effort to develop better and better offerings.