Part of Dell's server business is building custom machines for very large customers who want fewer bells and whistles but higher computing density and lower power consumption. The Dell PowerEdge C6220 is a server the company has brought out of this custom arena and into its regular sales channels. It is the second in a new series of servers that combines internal storage and two or four two-socket "nodes" (aka sleds or blades) wrapped up in a highly efficient 2RU package.

Some enterprise customers just aren't comfortable throwing their data into a public cloud environment, says Ellen Rubin, vice president of cloud products for Terremark, which is owned by Verizon.

At a time where the first generation of virtualised IT infrastructures are being prepared for renewal and the shift from virtualisation to private Cloud continues, well-planned risk management has become a critical measure in avoiding vulnerabilities in security, power, data management, and disaster recovery, according to a panel of Australian industry experts.

The public cloud doesn't work for everyone, says Pete Stevenson, CEO of Latisys, a cloud, managed hosting and colocation service provider that announced an expansion of its offerings and facilities today.

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.

Siemens Enterprise Communications, which has been rebuilding itself here in the U.S. for the past several years, will punctuate the idea that it deserves another look with the announcement Monday of Version 7.0 of its OpenScape UC suite that enables the VoIP platform to support up to 500,000 users.

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.

The power of the Cloud is being harnessed by IBM at this year’s Australian Open.

Coupa, a 2006 startup that helps more than 200 customer companies manage purchasing and procurement, doesn't own any IT infrastructure - it is run completely from the Amazon Web Service Cloud.

Given that Cloud computing is still emerging, it shouldn't come as a surprise that opinions vary widely on the best way to architect the storage. In fact, it seems likely that there is no such panacea - different types of private Cloud almost always require different approaches.

Public. Private. Hybrid. Cloudburst. Much of the discussion about cloud computing focuses on deployment options and choices, with a surprisingly large number of enterprises inclining toward internal private clouds-that is, a cloud-capable infrastructure residing within a company's own data center.