Many small businesses with larger server needs are turning to blade servers to pack big power into a small space. But what exactly is a blade server, and how do you know if it's right for your small business?

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.

Chinese communications vendor, Huawei, has appointed Simms International as a distributor for its enterprise product range.

Hewlett-Packard has unveiled some major updates to its Integrity line of Itanium-based servers, including a new edition of its top-end Superdome system based on HP's blade server architecture.

The recession may have forced Media General Inc. to scale back its grand plans for server virtualization in 2009, but like many other businesses, the communications company is planning a major push to make up lost ground this year.

2009 started with a bang and ended with a bash for Cisco.  

While total 2009 server sales still remain below last year's totals, IDC's quarterly tracker report released today indicates that worldwide demand for the systems among enterprise customers may finally be increasing.

Hewlett-Packard is trying to tackle concerns about the cost and complexity of thin-client computing with new products and tools announced Tuesday.

In 1986, Attorney Nicholas Barrett founded Nicholas Barrett & Associates with just himself and an assistant running the business. But over the last 24 years, that small two-person office has grown into a bustling 45-person law firm specializing in litigation, real estate law, collections, and loan servicing.