• Piston Cloud has made the tough private cloud decisions for you

  Joshua McKenty, co-founder and chief executive officer of Piston Cloud, what he calls The Enterprise OpenStack Company, was in on the ground floor of OpenStack's creation, working as he was on the Anso Labs team at NASA to build a compute cloud on top of open source platform Eucalyptus. The team eventually gave up on that and wrote Nova, which NASA uses today to power its Nebula Cloud environment, and Nova was ultimately contributed to the OpenStack project, which it formed with Rackspace. McKenty left NASA after Anso was acquired by Rackspace in 2010, and formed Piston Cloud in 2011 with co-founders Gretchen Curtis (also of NASA) and Christopher MacGown of Rackspace. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently caught up with McKenty for a deep dive on why OpenStack matters and where Piston Cloud fits in.

• Readying Ethernet for the converged data center

  Ethernet has emerged as the dominant network protocol but it has to overcome several key limitations if it is to become the foundation of choice for the converged data center.

• HP: No plans to kill off 3Com products

  HP Monday said it has no plans to kill off any existing HP or 3Com networking products, but did not rule out such a move in the future.

• Dell embeds Fibre Channel over Ethernet in server line

  Dell will offer Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) network interface cards in all of its servers. The move by the world's largest server provider is sure to bolster adoption of the nascent data transport protocol in enterprise data centers.

• Fans and skeptics argue on Fibre Channel over Ethernet

  This year's Storage Networking World Europe show focused attention on Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). However, while SAN vendors promoted FCoE as a way to extend Fibre Channel's reach and longevity, skeptics described it as unnecessary -- and perhaps even a Cisco-powered Trojan horse intended to wipe out rival networking supplier Brocade Communications.

Whitepapers about Fibre Channel over Ethernet

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  40 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet Overview

  This paper takes a look at the main forces that are driving Ethernet bandwidth upwards. It looks at the standards and architectural practices adopted by the different segments, how the different speeds of Ethernet are used and how its popularity has resulted in a complex ecosystem between carrier networks, enterprise networks, and consumers.