Here’s our gathering of the week’s news bits around software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), and related topics. We start with a batch of news from EMC, which hosted EMC World in Las Vegas this week.

… EMC revealed its plans to ship products for a hyper-converged infrastructure by the end of the year. The technology will combine VMware’s software and EMC’s hardware to unite server, storage, networking, and virtualization in a software-defined stack on a single commodity server.

… EMC and VMware have chosen Arista’s switches for key parts of their converged infrastructure appliance, dubbed code name “Project Mystic,” CRN reports. A spokesperson for EMC, which owns 80 percent of VMware, described claims of EMC's work with Arista as "speculation" and "way off base," but declined to comment further, perhaps because…

… EMC and Arista archrival Cisco are partners in VCE. VCE announced yesterday that it surpassed its 2013 goal of generating $1 billion in annual sales. VCE also is backed by investments from VMware and Intel. If the Arista news turns out to be true, it will surely strain an already complicated Cisco-EMC relationship.

… Rounding out EMC news, the company announced it will acquire flash storage startup DSSD. Andy Bechtolsheim, founder of Arista and of Sun Microsystems, will serve as DSSD 's strategic advisor.

… In non-EMC news, Calient announced two new optical circuit-switch subsystems. The MSM-320 and OMM-320 — a 320-port optical switch and 320-port power-monitoring module, respectively — will allow networking vendors to integrate optical circuit switching into their routing and switching systems. Calient pitched optical switches to telecom vendors for years, and still does, but now it's also got ambitions for SDN and the data center.

… Wind River announced a new performance benchmark for its Carrier Grade Communications Server, saying it can outdo standard Open vSwitch software by 20x. Wind River clocked CGCS on two processor cores delivering 12 million packets per second to virtual machines, bi-directionally.

… Google acquired cloud monitoring startup Stackdriver. Most of Stackdriver’s existing products and services are largely focused on Amazon Web Services, but they also support providers including Rackspace and Google Compute Engine.

… From the put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is file: HP announced it plans to invest more than $1 billion over the next two years on open cloud-related products and engineering. The company launched its opening shot this week with the release of HP Helion, a line of cloud products and services that incorporates existing HP cloud offerings and new OpenStack-based products.

We end this week with executive comings and goings…

… Juniper Executive VP of Strategy Luis Avila-Marco left to spend more time with family in Atlanta, Network World reports.

… Extreme Networks COO Chris Crowell left "effective immediately." No word on why, but it's not unexpected; Crowell is the former CEO of Enterasys, which Extreme acquired last fall.

… Also at Extreme, Ken Arola will come on board as CFO in June. He will take over the role from John Kurtzweil, who will serve as “special assistant to the CEO” until the fall.

… Rounding out our news on musical corner offices, and potentially topping them all: Guido Jouret, the vice president heading Cisco's Internet of Things efforts, is outa there, as blogger Brad Reese reported (and Cisco confirmed) Thursday.