The start-up Piston Cloud Computing Inc delivered the thing, which makes sense since Piston’s founders were instrumental in OpenStack, which is a framework, not a product. The widgetry is called Piston Enterprise OS or pentOS for short and it will sell for $3,500 a server a year, a price that includes 24/7 telephone support.

Piston co-founder and CEO Joshua McKenty said Piston sold maybe 10 of the things ahead of general availability and the code was destined for big iron $250,000 hardware installations. People apparently just bought it after seeing the demo at Cloud Expo. Nothing is in production yet.

pentOS is cheap compared to VMware, the only alternative. McKenty said it would probably cost $17,000 a server a year using VMware and that’s before factoring storage in. If you tried to do it yourself, he said it would probably cost $20,000 a server.

The widgetry is targeted at private enterprise cloud environments. It uses Diablo, the latest cut of OpenStack. It’s only good inside a single data center. It’ll need the next cut Essex to do cloud hopping and span multiple clouds. Users, however, can cut a single site into 10 zones with each one supporting, say, 200 servers. Such a configuration could support 20,000 VMs, but they’d be small.

Although confined to a single data center, pentOS promises high availability. It is supposed to be focused on security and the easy operation. In that respect it’s supposed to install in 10 minutes.

Piston’s CloudKey is said to deliver 99.999% automated and hands-free installation of the pentOS software to servers and switches. (It fancies Arista.)

Piston is looking to cultivate the financial market, government and the bio techs, clients with serious regulatory requirements. McKenty says, “As we continue to see security lag in the public cloud environment, it is clear that private cloud is really the only option for organizations dealing with large volumes of regulated data.”

The company’s Null-Tier Architecture combines storage, compute and networking on every node to deliver massive scalability with what it claims is “unprecedented cost efficiency.” It says users can scale a high-availability private cloud, one server at a time.

pentOS is also the first implementation of CloudAudit, an open security standard for cloud and virtualized environments. There will be automatic security updates via a subscription service.

Under pentOS is a custom-built Linux distribution. It will interoperate with any other OpenStack-based public cloud environment, including Rackspace, Dell, Amazon, Internap and AT&T.

Piston was started early last year. McKenty was the technical architect of NASA’s Nebula Cloud Computing Platform and the OpenStack compute components. CTO Christopher MacGown was part of OpenStack’s Nova-core development team at Rackspace. The start-up has gotten $5 million in funding from Hummer Winblad, True Ventures and Divergent Ventures.

It’s the first US telecom service provider to sign up for the free Rackspace-NASA-spawned open source cloud initiative.

AT&T CTO John Donovan said AT&T has been participating in OpenStack for more than a year and has contributed a blueprint for a potential new function in OpenStack focused on transactional task management.

Donovan said the OpenStack IaaS is housed on dedicated infrastructure in AT&T data centers in Dallas, San Diego and Secaucus, New Jersey to start. The company means to more than double the number of centers with open source capabilities this year.

Evidently AT&T is using OpenStack – or elements of it – underneath a new commodity-style cloud for developers called Cloud Architect that’s presumably intended to compete with Amazon Web Services et al.

The widgetry is supposed to offer “cost-efficient access to highly flexible, integrated computing and application development services.”

Donovan blogs that “developers need the reliability and stability of our differentiated cloud too, but first and foremost, developers need flexibility, affordability and speed in turning up new services.”

Cloud Architect is supposed to provide a “powerful set of options and configurations.” Donovan says developers will be able to set up public and private computing instances or choose to build from the ground up with AT&T’s bare metal or dedicated server options.

“Soon,” he said, “complicated configurations will be a thing of the past. AT&T Cloud Architect will bring you an automated, standardized and fast way to pick, provision and deploy servers over the web within minutes or hours, not days.” There will evidently be a menu of storage, network and monitoring options to choose from along with 24/7 support for a monthly subscription fee. The infrastructure itself will be priced hourly or monthly.

Cloud Architect, part of AT&T’s Hosting Service, is supposed to available sometime in the “coming weeks” – GigaOm suggests that means a couple of weeks from now – and AT&T is promising to expand the developer-centric service throughout the year.

AT&T is proposing to offer CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Red Hat and Windows Server and at some point down the road a complete API framework.

AT&T’s sudden bid to cultivate developers evidently ties in with the fact that they’re the ones who produce apps for AT&T’s mobile broadband customers and that integrate with AT&T’s billing system. AT&T is planning an HTML5 App Store. Among other things it’s promising tools for the Internet-accessible U-verse TV service.

It said in an advisory to its channel that the price hikes will last for the duration of the crisis that has seen an estimated one-third of the world’s HDD supply effectively drown in the unforgiving Thai floods.

That probably works out to something like 50 Million-70 million drives.

Senior VP of global channel sales Gregg Ambulos claimed that EMC had absorbed the cost increases produced by shortages in Q4 “to shield our partners and customers from the impact of higher drive pricing,” but now that supplies and stockpiles have shrunk further and capacity demand keeps escalating EMC’s going to have to pass the increases along “to offset the continued high drive prices we are seeing from our primary suppliers.”

The price hikes will apply to HDD list prices across all of EMC business lines.

The company says it “hopes that this increase is temporary” but it can’t predict how long the shortages will last.

Some people think it could be well into 2013 before production is back to normal.

HP, whose new CEO Meg Whitman bragged that she thought HP had arranged for more than its fair share of existing supplies when the deluge hit, warned customers and resellers on November 21 to expect significantly higher prices on certain disk drives.

It didn’t say when and it didn’t say which and didn’t say how much, but apparently large-capacity SAS and SATA drives are in short supply. And it said component prices were up ~20%.

There are two beneficiaries in this tragedy: solid-state drives – as prices come down – and open source storage merchants like Nexenta whose marketing VP Bill Roth figures customers are going to rebel at paying 5%-15% on top of “EMC’s already usurious prices.”

The longer the crisis lasts, he figures, the better it is for companies whose business models are based on OpenStorage. They’re not immune to price hikes in essential materials like disk drives, but their solutions, based on commodity hardware, are 60%-80% cheaper to begin with so any price hikes will be less disruptive to the customer.

He thinks the major storage vendors could be permanently damaged.

It also might be nice if we stopped building things on the edge of a precipice like Silicon Valley sitting on top of the San Andreas Fault.

See http://e01.ams11.com/OutboundMessage.aspx?M=1345.b71d99a4-cdc0-4b13-9cc0-ca3541fd7bec.

It gives Azure Big Data capabilities and advanced data analytics and a better shot at competing with rival clouds like Amazon’s EC2 and Google’s Ap Engine.

Users can build MapReduce jobs. Microsoft said a Hive ODBC Driver and Hive Add-in for Excel would enable data analysis of unstructured data through Excel and PowerPivot.

Would-be users have to submit a form and Microsoft will pick the testers it wants based on use cases. Microsoft gave no indication when the widgetry would be more than a preview.

It’s part of an upgrade that includes SQL Azure Database tickles and simplified Azure billing and management.

The size of the database can now top out at 150GB, up from 50GB without costing more and it’s supposedly easier to scale-out a “virtually unlimited” elastic database tier.

A downloadable SDK has JavaScript libraries and a run-time engine for the Node.JS framework, with support for hosting, storage and service bus.

It’s for creating and scaling web apps that run on the Azure Windows Server.

The added language support means Microsoft wants Azure to appeal to developers beyond the .NET walled garden.

With the SDK Microsoft says Azure can integrate with other open source applications, including the Eclipse IDE (an updated plug-in), MongoDB and Solr/Lucene search engine. Access to Azure libraries for .NET, Java and Node.js is now available under an Apache 2 open-source license and hosted on GitHub.

The update offers a free 90-day trial and spending caps with views of real-time usage and billing details at Azure’s new Metro-style Management Portal.

Pricing has been adjusted. The maximum price per SQL Azure DB is $499.95.The price per gigabyte of large SQL Azure databases have been cut 67% and data transfer prices in North America and Europe have been reduced by 25% to 12 cent a GB. Asia-Pacific data transfers that were 20 cents a GB, are now 19 cents a GB, 5% cheaper.

Well, everybody needs to sell a lot of products, but Cisco is particularly needy or else it wouldn’t be in the middle of a restructuring now would it.

So to move a lot of products it’s come with CloudVerse, which isn’t a product, it’s a framework, a “framework that combines the foundational elements – unified data center, cloud-intelligent network and cloud applications – needed to build, manage and connect public, private and hybrid clouds.”

What that means is that it’s stitching existing products together so they can be sold for more money as a package and to sex it up a bit it’s throwing in some new automation, management and collaboration widgetry like a perspective “Cloud-to-Cloud Connect” capability that will allow a data center nearing capacity to push service fulfillment seamlessly to a sister data center.

Such a Networking Positioning System will depend on new Cisco routers due next year.

Anyway, CTO Padmasree Warrior said, “For a long time we’ve provided individual components. What we are doing now is bringing these sets of products together.” Naturally all the moving parts in the CloudVerse vision will work together a whole lot better if customers oblige Cisco and buy the whole infrastructure kit and caboodle from Cisco, particularly its Unified Computing Systems, which aren’t even bringing in a billion dollars a year yet, and of course Cisco’s signature networking.

It’s particularly important to Cisco since the cloud could be 20% of total IT spending next year and, based on Cisco’s recently released Cloud Index, its study of cloud network traffic, the private cloud could account for 50% of enterprise data center computing by 2014.

Cisco is appealing to both folks who want to resell cloud services and those who want a private cloud. It doesn’t want to use CloudVerse itself and go into competition with Amazon.

Apparently it’s been keeping CloudVerse up its sleeve for a while because it says that 70% of leading cloud providers is using CloudVerse and ticks off Fujitsu, Orange Business Services, Silicon Valley Bank, Telecom Italia, Telefónica Spain, Telstra and Verizon Terremark as customers.

The CloudVerse pool of resources won’t limit Cisco to its VCE partner VMware’s virtualization either. Instead, for broader appeal it’ll also include Microsoft’s Hyper-V and Red Hat’s KVM as well as IBM or HP hypervisors for their AIX or HP-UX environments, according to InformationWeek, complements of Intelligent Automation for the Cloud (IAC).

That’s a new software management system assembled from components contributed by Cisco acquisitions Tidal Software and newScale to automate operations environment for virtual servers.

IAC provides a self-service portal, service catalog, orchestration, automated provisioning, lifecycle management and pay-per-use tracking. Meanwhile, Cisco’s new policy-based Network Services Manager can configure and modify both virtualized network components in a cloud environment. \

Cisco claims that moving from a traditional virtualized data center to a CloudVerse cloud can reduce IT total cost of ownership (opex and capex) by up to 50% and reduce the time to offer new cloud services from weeks to minutes.