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.

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.

IBM reversed course on networking in 2010 when it acquired Blade Network Technologies, one of its key network suppliers. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix and Managing Editor Jim Duffy recently caught up with Vikram Mehta, founder of BNT and now vice president of IBM System Networking, for an update on IBM's network visions going forward.

This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter's approach.

Centrelink has kicked off a major technology purchasing initiative worth between $30 million and $40 million, as the national welfare agency continues its drive towards shifting its storage architecture towards being used as a service.

The Government-funded company responsible for the rollout of the National Broadband Network, NBN Co, has announced 14 new sites in mainland Australia that will get fibre to the premises.

Local governments and residents have until tonight to nominate their communities for consideration in Google's plan to build "ultra-high-speed" fiber networks in some places in the U.S.

Dell entered the Fibre Channel over Ethernet market last week with OEM deals from Brocade and QLogic and endorsed 10Gigabit Ethernet as a customer's technology of choice.