This week there were a number of interesting developments in cloud infrastructure circles, including a cloud deal or two and Hewlett-Packard's new strategy to “vaporize” data centers.

First of, EMC announced on Monday that it is acquiring “cloud computing” firm Cloudscaling, which specializes in building cloud management implementations based on the OpenStack open source technology. It's not a big deal -- less than $50 million, according to sources at Bloombemployee resource group (ERG). Cloudscaling, founded in 2006 and based in San Francisco, raised more than $10 million from investors including Trinity Ventures and Juniper Networks Inc.

In another announcement, HP said it has joined VMware's super futuristic EVO:RAIL iniatiative. And, at the same time, it also announced that it's in the business of vaporizing silos.

If that doesn't make any sense to you, that's okay. I'll let you read the headline from Hewlett-Packard's actual press release. It said this: “HP Vaporizes Virtual Infrastructure Silos With StoreVirtual-Based Hyper-Converged Appliance.”

Oh dear. I thought we wanted to build cloud infrastructure, not destroy it. And this is a storage product. Do customers really want to vaporize their storage silos? And if they did, how would they do it? Dynamite the flash arrays?

HP CEO Meg Whitman has many challenges ahead of her, and you can now add PR copywriting to the list. The HP ConvergedSystem 200-HC press release is such an masterpiece of incomprehensible marketing jargon, I should quote for you directly:

“To address this need, HP is introducing the HP ConvergedSystem 200-HC StoreVirtual, which combines all required hardware and management into a single scale-out system. Architected for simplicity and built on proven and open data services, the system includes HP OneView InstantOn, HP OneView for VMware vCenter, and HP StoreVirtual VSA technology for simple self-installation and management of fully clustered, highly available servers and storage. This flexible solution is aimed to help midsize businesses, remote offices and branch office locations that want a building block approach to infrastructure in order to simplify IT operations, accelerate service delivery, and enable enhanced disaster recovery for virtualized as well as physical servers.”

Now, I am a qualified tech analyst with more than two decades of experience, but after reading all 108 of those words, not only am I exhausted, but I have absolutely no idea what it means. Something about HP thinking it has new storage product to sell?

The EVO:Rail announcement isn't much better, prose-wise. HP and VMware have announced a jointly developed product, which is romantically named the “The HP ConvergedSystem 200-HC EVO:RAIL.”

Wondering what this sucker does? “New Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Offering Delivers Turnkey, Flexible Approach for Midmarket and Enterprises to Rapidly Roll Out Software-Defined Infrastructure.”

But wait, there's more...

“Hyper-convergence introduces a new IT infrastructure delivery and consumption model with a software-centric architecture that tightly integrates compute, network, storage and management resources seamlessly.”

When I first read the press release, I thought it meant that HP was re-badging VMware's virtualization stack on some standardized hardware, but I'm not sure.

I'm writing this late Tuesday night. I would try to do some real analysis here, but it's too late, and I want to go to bed. It's not even Wednesday and the Software Defined Networking (SDN) and virtualization marketeers have won. They've put me to sleep.