Today, April 9, Californian Piston Cloud Computing announced a new release of its core product built on OpenStack open source cloud framework: Piston Enterprise OpenStack.
Piston Cloud, founded in January 2011 by former NASA and Rackspace leaders, joined OpenStack Foundation as a gold member in September 2012. The company raised $8M in a series B funding from Cisco System, Data Collective, Divergent Ventures, Hummer Winblad, Swisscom Ventures and True Ventures in February 2013.
Piston Enterprise OpenStack 2.0, is a bare-metal cloud operating system for deploying and managing a private Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud environment.
Among the highlights of this new release:
- Out of the Box Storage: Piston Enterprise OpenStack 2.0 now supports pass-through mode, allowing users to use the existing infrastructure with RAID-based Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) or SATA equipment.
- Add Virtual Machines in Less than a Second: Piston Enterprise OpenStack includes Virtual Memory Streaming (VMS), a commercial extension to KVM that provides true live migration and powerful multi-server memory oversubscription.
- SDN Compatibility: Piston Enterprise OpenStack is compatible with the software-defined networking (SDN) vendor ecosystem and automates the configuration and management of a network configuration, including traffic shaping and L2 segregation.
- Automated Provisioning and Management: With MoxieHA, users can perform security updates, apply complete system upgrades or re-balance VMs, without system or VM downtime.
- Configuration Management Without the Configuration: CloudBoot is a system orchestration framework that detects and provisions hardware using an Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) and netboots the nodes to a hardened, embedded Linux environment and then passes off system control to MoxieHA.
- More Hardware Options: Piston Enterprise OpenStack is 1nteroperable with other OpenStack products and can be deployed on commodity hardware from any major x86 vendor, including IBM, Dell, Cisco, HP and Supermicro.
Joshua McKenty, CTO and co-founder of Piston Cloud, said:
The servers in today’s data center are like puppies – they’ve got names and when they get sick, everything grinds to a halt while you nurse them back to health, Piston Enterprise OpenStack is a system for managing your servers like cattle – you number them, and when they get sick and you have to shoot them in the head, the herd can keep moving. It takes a family of three to care for a single puppy, but a few cowboys can drive tens of thousands of cows over great distances, all while drinking whiskey.