Piston Cloud unveils enterprise OpenStack 2.0

Since the company first launched back in January 2011, Piston Cloud has built a solid reputation within the OpenStack community. The company was founded by key individuals involved in the cloud market early on, folks like Joshua McKenty, former NASA Nebula chief technical architect; Christopher MacGown, former Rackspace luminary working on its Cloud Servers infrastructure cloud; and Gretchen Curtis, former communications director for the CTO office at NASA.

When many core OpenStack developers who worked on the original Nebula cloud project at NASA broke away, quite a few of them ended up joining McKenty at Piston Cloud to continue what they started.

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Piston Cloud quickly kicked into first gear with a Series A funding round of $4.5 million in June 2011; it followed up more recently in February 2013 with a Series B round of $8 million to reach its goal to further the natural evolution of the OpenStack project while focusing on meeting the needs of the enterprise.

This month, the company is ready to make good on that promise. Less than two weeks ago, the company delivered its turnkey Piston Enterprise OpenStack 2.0 distribution, created to provide an organization with a relatively easy way to start building and managing its own OpenStack cloud deployment.

According to the company, the new 2.0 release will allow for more available storage hardware options and less rigid software while moving to a more recent version of the OpenStack code. With this latest version, Piston Cloud is also targeting enterprise organizations that want to end their dependency on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and instead fulfill their own cloud needs internally.

Jim Morrisroe, CEO of Piston Cloud, said the company’s software will allow an organization to take full advantage of OpenStack without the administrative complexity, so they can focus on building and deploying applications instead of spending time on their infrastructure.

Morrisroe continued, “Piston Enterprise OpenStack 2.0 is perfect for enterprise DevOps teams and AWS customers that want to reduce operating costs and dependencies with a private cloud solution, while maintaining the agility and scalable performance of a true cloud architecture.”

Piston’s Enterprise OpenStack 2.0 is based on an older version of OpenStack, the Folsom release that came out last September. The company decided to stick with the Folsom release rather than use the more recent Grizzly build of OpenStack, which reached general availability weeks ago. The reason for that, according to Piston Cloud: The company is aiming for a more production-level stability and reliability platform rather than forcing customers to live on the bleeding edge of technology.

It’s also important to remember that while OpenStack forms the core of the Piston Cloud solution, there are many other important components that allow it to separate itself from the pack — and let the company use the catchphrase, “more than just OpenStack.”

Discussing the new 2.0 release, Joshua McKenty, co-founder & CTO of Piston Cloud states:

Virtual machines can be highly available, stored on durable, replicated shared storage, or they can take advantage of ephemeral, high-speed local disk. AWS API support is greatly improved, so bringing a few of your favorite (or most costly to host) applications in-house is a snap. And we’ve broadened our hardware compatibility list and expanded our trial licensing options, making it likely that you can complete a successful Enterprise OpenStack pilot using the hardware you’ve already got on-hand.

Piston Enterprise OpenStack 2.0 delivers a built-in shared storage solution, out of the box, using Ceph, an open source filesystem and storage framework now backed by commercial startup Inktank.

Piston also includes support for Virtual Memory Streaming (VMS), a commercial extension to the KVM open source hypervisor that allows live migration of KVM virtual machines. The VMS software also does memory oversubscription, which provides the ability to assign even more virtual machines to a physical server than what might have been otherwise allowed. And it can provide instant cloning of running VMs and boot them up in less than a second, according to McKenty.

McKenty also stated that Enterprise OpenStack is compatible with the entire software-defined networking (SDN) vendor ecosystem. Though SDN is in its infancy, companies like Cisco, HP, and Juniper are producing routers and switches that are capable of supporting SDN protocols such as OpenFlow. It also automates the configuration and management of a “best practices network configuration.”

With this release, the company has automated provisioning and management with Piston Cloud’s high-availability technology, MoxieHA. According to the company, users can easily perform security updates, apply complete system updates, or rebalance virtual machines without system or VM downtime.

As another differentiator from the competition, Piston claims its Enterprise OpenStack 2.0 is certified to run on a number of x86 hardware platforms, including Cisco Systems UCS C Series rack servers, Dell PowerEdge R710, R720, and C6220 servers, HP ProLiant DL360 and DL380 servers, the IBM System x3650 rack server, and commodity x86 Supermicro servers.

While the company continues its journey to see its vision through, it is not without heavy competition among other software providers also looking to provide companies with a way to build their own private cloud operations within the corporate firewall. Other vendors hoping to take away market share from Amazon (and each other) include folks like VMware, which recently announced a public cloud option of its own; Nebula, another startup coming out of NASA; and the Apache Software Foundation’s CloudStack, with former owner Citrix as a major backer of the project.

Currently in open beta and available for free for 90 days. Piston Cloud also provides training and professional services to support enterprise-level integration for custom authentication, audit and compliance, or monitoring solutions.

This article, “Piston Cloud unveils enterprise OpenStack 2.0,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization and cloud computing at InfoWorld.com.