In a new report from InformationWeek, IT analyst Kurt Marko discusses the major features of private cloud and reviews several usage scenarios. He describes the difference between data center virtualization and cloud as “the difference between watering a garden with buckets versus a hose.” Of Piston Cloud, he writes:

… pentOS is a veritable cloud OS for an entire rack. It ships on a USB key (called a CloudKey) that is installed via a ToR switch. Upon rebooting, the CloudKey almost virally takes over the switch by loading its own pentOS software, which subsequently installs onto every attached server in the rack. Because Piston uses distributed storage volumes with local disks on each server, scaling the cloud means connecting another server to the switch: it’s automatically discovered and “Borg’ed” into the cloud, with its CPUs and local storage allocated to the cloud resource pool.

Read the full article at InformationWeek Reports (you’ll need to sign up for a free account).