The plan as of now is for the first piece of station hardware, which looks like the central core of Mir, to be launched from Baikonur in June, with the first U.S. piece, called Node 1, to be launched on the shuttle in early July.

CNN: The View from Space

Launched in April, the 1, 000-node network is anchored by two redundant 3Com CoreBuilder 9000 switches interconnected by dual 1Gbps Gigabit Ethernet-trunked connections.

CNN: Gigabit Ethernet meets Van Gogh at Christie's

Each node has 2-8 Xeon 5650 processors providing 6-48 coes and up to 768 GB of RAM, 1.3 TB of Fusion-io ioDrive PCIe flash cards and a mid-layer of up to 1.2 TB of Intel SSD storage.

FORBES: Explosive Growth in Flash Memory Enterprise Applications