Servers are fun again as Intel and HP pitch new architectures for the data center. Server market upheaval is sure to follow---and probably rhyme with what the PC industry has seen.

There seems to be no end in sight to the uncertainty and debate over what, exactly, constitutes an open source cloud. What's far more clear, however, is that the concept is rapidly gaining ground. Here are just a few pieces of evidence from the past few weeks that suggest the open cloud is on the rise.

Want to know what Microsoft thinks enterprises want? Look at the APIs in each generation of Windows to read the architectural tea leaves...

Very steadily, Piston Cloud has gained a reputation as a company with some smart strategies surrounding the OpenStack open cloud computing platform and how it can serve enterprises. In February, the company also announced that it had raised $8 million in Series B financing follows a $4.5 million Series A round in July, 2011. This week, the company has delivered its "turnkey" Enterprise OpenStack 2.0 distribution, which looks like a relatively easy way to start dabbling with an OpenStack cloud deployment.  Piston is specifically targeting enterprises that want to "end dependency" on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for cloud needs. According to the announcement of  Enterprise OpenStack 2.0: "Our turnkey OpenStack software allows organizations to take full advantage of OpenStack without the administrative complexity, so they can focus on building and deploying applications instead of on their infrastructure,” said Jim Morrisroe, CEO of Piston Cloud. “Piston Enterprise OpenStack 2.0...