Fusion-io, a Salt Lake City-based flash storage vendor, has revealed its plans to hire around 40 to 50 officials at top level, by the end of this year. The company already has some big clients like Facebook and Credit Suisse in its kitty, and is now eyeing on a $150 million initial public offering, while recently opening an office in Superior, CO. Interestingly, Fusion-io is hiring for the same office.

It has leased a space of 10,000 square feet on the third floor of 409 S. McCaslin Blvd., a building off U.S. 36. This prime location is also the home to KeyBank’s local operations. Giving his thoughts is Bob Wood, Fusion-io’s director of reliability, who also is heading the Superior operations said,

“Boulder County seemed a prime locale for the company to recruit software developers, software architects and technologists. Colorado, and this area in particular, has got a really outstanding high-tech community.

“The company currently employs 10 people locally and is “aggressively seeking” to hire others.We’re seeing growth and we are trying to meet the demand by hiring more technical resources.”

This Colorado’s office will be Fusion-io’s third operational center, adding to the Utah and San Jose centers. In regards to its IPO, the company filed papers for a future IPO last month, a move done in order to raise around $150 million, following the heels of growing national recognition for the 5 year-old, venture-backed firm that counts Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak as its chief scientist.  It also has all the Wall Street heavy hitters as underwriters, including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan and Credit Suisse.

Moving ahead, we also heard that Fusion-io teaming up with StoneFly, an integrated IP storage area network (SAN) systems manufacturer. Through the agreement StoneFly’s SCVM and ESS Windows virtual SAN software appliances will be bundled with Fusion-io’s ioMemory product line, and the new platform will be offered to joint customers. Further, at the National Association of Broadcasters Show that started this week, JMR will launch, and offer a live demonstration of the latest produce from their collaboration with Fusion-io. The main features of this new solution are smaller footprints, bolstered capacity, and extended PCI Express bus on host to support additional ioMemory memory or peripherals and decreased transcode/encode times.

Looking at the Cloud industry as a whole, Xeround, an SQL DaaS provider for private and public clouds, has a new offering, now supporting Rackspace.The addition of support for the Rackspace Cloud is a huge milestone for Xeriound’s SQL DaaS offering, which until now ran only on Amazon EC2 and the Heroku PaaS, a favorite of Ruby developers.

VMware also reached an important milestone within the cloud computing sphere as the industry’s first open PaaS, Cloud Foundry released yesterday. Deemed as the new generation platform designed specifically for cloud-computing environments, Cloud Foundry aims to streamline the development, delivery and operations of modern apps, and rallying developers to run and scale their applications.

But not every cloud-related company is on a growing streak.  We also heard about Cisco retrenching around 550 employees costing the company $300 million for lay off charges. It will also dispossess some of its consumer businesses, including the Eos media solutions business, and Flip, which the company purchased last 2009 for about $600 million.