StarTech presents a server cabinet customers can blend with office decor-- a 12U office server cabinet (RKWOODCAB12) featuring wood laminate exterior paneling and a shaded glass front window.

Ideal for the storage of server, network or AV equipment in boardrooms or small offices, the cabinet features a 4-post enclosed rack supporting up to 136kg. The rails are adjustable (from 45.3 to 52.3cm) to accommodate different equipment sizes, while cable grommet on the top and rear panels and a base entry panel allow for easy cable routing.

The 25 Gigabit Ethernet Consortium formed by Google, Microsoft, Arista Networks, Broadcom and Mellanox starts work on an industry-standard specification for a 25Gbps and 50Gbps ethernet protocol.

The consortium aims to not only boost performance but also slash internet costs per Gbps between server Network Interface Controller (NIC) and Top-of-Rac (ToR) switch.

In comparison to current 10 and 40Gbps ethernet links the single-lane 25 and dual-lane 50Gbps links will enable up to 2.5x higher performance per physical lane or twinax copper wire between rack endpoint and switch, at least according to the consortium.

The finished definitional will cover physical layer (PHY) and media access control layer (MAC) behavior, including virtual lane alignment, autonegotiation and forward error correction characteristics.

In a bid to take on the use of low-power ARM processors in cloud servers Intel announces it is now selling customisable Xeon-based data centre chips to large customers at the GigaOm Structure conference.

The chip-- specifically the Xeon E5-FPGA-- allows customers to incorporate own software and IP via built-in field-programmable gate array (FPGA). As Intel puts it this allows programming for specific functions and workloads, such as search or video compression.

"That allows end users that have applications that can benefit from acceleration to load their IP and accelerate that algorithm on that FPGA as an offload," Intel says at the conference. "The FPGA has direct access to the Xeon cache hierarchy and system memory."

Facebook reveals a next step in its vision of turning the data center as we know it into something more flexible and scalable with the "Wedge" top-of-rack switch and its "FBOSS" Linux-based OS.

The Wedge switch is designed to work with both commercial and open-source networking products. It packs an  an actual microserver module (one based on Facebook's "Group Hug" architecture), meaning it runs a server complete with own networking OS next to the traditional networking silicon.

"By using a real server module in the switch, we're able to bring switches into our distributed fleet management systems and provision them with our standard Linux-based operating environment," the company says. "This enables us to deploy, monitor, and control these systems alongside our servers and storage-— which in turn allows our engineers to focus more on bringing new capabilities to our network and less on managing the existing systems."