Piston Cloud Computing Computing, which has been focused on the OpenStack cloud computing platform, today announced, in conjunction with an Intelemage customer announcement, announcement, a new release of Piston OpenStack, the company's OpenStack distribution for orchestrating private clouds. Piston is notable for its involvement with the original cloud project that became OpenStack, and for its heavy involvement with the OpenStack Foundation and the Cloud Foundry Community Advisory Board. Piston is going so far as to call its latest release “the last OpenStack you’ll ever try."

Piston officials are claiming that total cost of ownership (TCO) for its OpenStack distribution will be far lower than costs for other platforms. Piston OpenStack 3.0 is available now, and may be downloaded free for 90 days at http://www.pistoncloud.com/start. After the 90-day free trial period, the new platform Piston OpenStack is available through an annual software subscription license, which includes an automated, online update service and access to 24×7 customer support.

“Piston delivered the first commercial OpenStack product to market, and over the last two years, we’ve seen incredible customer success," said Jim Morrisroe, CEO of Piston, in a statement. "To date, dozens of companies, from leading financial services organizations and medical research labs to global service providers and federal government agencies, have deployed Piston OpenStack, at scale, in diverse production environments.”

New features in Piston OpenStack 3.0 include:

Enhanced Storage: "Fine-grained Fine-grained configuration of multi-tier storage pools for improved performance and cost-efficiency."

cost-efficiency.

Enhanced Networking: A wide range of software-defined networking (SDN) options including Juniper Contrail™, PLUMgrid™, and VMware NSX™.

Moxie Runtime Environment™ (RTE) Access: Now customers can leverage Piston’s distributed systems orchestration, Moxie RTE™, to deploy third party services and run any infrastructure service as highly-available and disaster-proof.

New Cluster Management

and API toolsA new dashboard interface for working with

APIs and Tools: Richer tools for node health monitoring and cluster management.

Remote Technical Support Access: One-click secure access to customer support.

Redesigned Dashboard: New user interface (UI) for improved usability.

Multi-Region Management: New dashboard interface makes it easy for users to consume clouds of 10,000 servers distributed over multiple geo-locations through a single API.

“We are the OpenStack vendor who doesn’t have a dog in your fight,” added Joshua McKenty, CTO and co-founder of Piston. “From our close partnerships with every major vendor of SDN, SDS, orchestration tools, hardware and PaaS, Piston has the only OpenStack solution certified to run everything you care about. We believe your solution should be built from the best-of-breed at every tier, beginning with Piston OpenStack. We have no secret agenda.”

You can find out more about the new platform here.

Jason writes with an update to the amazing, kickstarted Librarybox project: "The LibraryBox Project, as a part of its ongoing efforts to bring information to areas without communication infrastructures, announced the release of the v2.0 public beta today. Boing Boing was kind enough to post about the very successful Kickstarter from July and this is the next stage of the project arising from that funding.

"LibraryBox is an open source digital distribution device, designed to route around both censorship and poor infrastructure by creating a hyperlocal digital file distribution point for use by libraries, educators, or anyone who wants to share files quickly and easily. The v2.0 release makes building your own LibraryBox easier than ever, while increasing the customizability and flexibility of the interface."

LibraryBox v2.0: Portable Private Digital Distribution (Thanks, Jason!)

Amazing Aluminum Human Wire Sculptures

Korean artist Seung Mo Park created these incredible human figure sculptures using tightly wrapped layers of aluminum wire based on fiberglass forms. The works shown here are part of the Brooklyn-based artist’s Human series where he recreates the delicate wrinkles and folds of clothing as well as the sinuous musculature of the human body in metallic layers reminiscent of tree rings. He’s also sculpted bicycles, musical instruments and other forms as part of his Object series.

A mere $40K gets you Syndaver's full-body practice cadaver, a beautifully detailed surgical simulator, with "skin with fat and fascia planes, every bone, muscle, tendon, and ligament in the body, fully articulating joints, a functioning respiratory system including trachea, lungs, and diaphragm, a complete digestive tract from the esophagus to rectum, the urinary tract (kidneys, bladder, and urethra), visceral organs (liver, gall bladder, pancreas, spleen), reproductive organs, a circulatory system with heart and coronary arteries, aorta, vena cava, and the primary arterial and venous trunks leading to the extremities."

They call it "pinnacle of hands-on surgical simulation" and "a 3D jigsaw puzzle" -- and who am I to argue. If $40K is too rich for your synthetic blood, they also do organs, wearable simulators for training roleplay, synthetic tissues, and a whole range of delightful wobbly bits.

The model pumps heated synthetic blood (pulsed flow away from the heart and drainage toward the heart), is capable of insufflation, and can be intubated and ventilated. Individual tissues of construction have been validated by SynDaver™ Labs over the last decade to mimic the mechanical and physico-chemical properties of the relevant living tissue.

Additional soft tissues included but not shown include full-body fascia, subcutaneous fat, and skin. ALL muscles, bones, organs, and vascular components are separately removable and replaceable to allow onsite servicing and upgrades.

The model may be covered with either the standard SynDaver™ synthetic human (pure wet chemistry) skin or our new organosilicate-synthetic human hybrid (polymer outer - wet inner) skin.

03 SynDaver Full Body (via Kadrey)