Start-Up Piston Cloud Computing
In bare-metal cloud OS for private IaaS cloud environment
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on April 15, 2013 at 2:48 pmPiston Cloud Computing, Inc., an enterprise OpenStack company, announced a new release of Piston Enterprise OpenStack, a bare-metal cloud OS for deploying and managing a private IaaS cloud environment.
The commercial OpenStack solution now delivers a truly lights-out model for the software-defined data center and improved API support for businesses that want to end their dependency on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
"Our turnkey OpenStack software allows organizations to take full advantage of OpenStack without the administrative complexity, so they can focus on building and deploying applications instead of on their infrastructure," said Jim Morrisroe, CEO of Piston Cloud. "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 Enterprise OpenStack 2.0:
More than Just OpenStack
Piston Enterprise OpenStack delivers storage, compute and networking virtualization through the OpenStack interfaces, with service, system orchestration and enhanced enterprise features under the hood.
Now on OpenStack Folsom, new and expanded product
features and benefits in version 2.0 include:
- Out of the Box Storage: Piston Enterprise OpenStack delivers a flexible shared storage fabric, out of the box, using Ceph – a commercially supported open source software storage solution. Piston Cloud’s Null-Tier Architecture approach delivers a complete virtual SAN solution using nothing but direct-attached drives off of the same servers that provide capacity for virtual machines. Piston Enterprise OpenStack 2.0 now supports pass-through mode, allowing users to take advantage of existing infrastructure with more traditional RAID-based SAS or SATA equipment.
- Add Virtual Machines in Less than a Second: It includes Virtual Memory Streaming (VMS), a commercial extension to KVM that provides live migration and multi-server memory oversubscription. VMS provides an instance cloning capability that allows users to launch and run additional virtual machines in less than a second.
- SDN Compatibility: It is compatible with the entire software-defined networking (SDN) vendor ecosystem and automates the configuration and management of a best practices network configuration, including traffic shaping and L2 segregation.
- Automated Provisioning and Management: With MoxieHA, Piston Cloud’s patent-pending, high-availability technology, users can perform security updates, apply complete system upgrades or re-balance VMs, without system or VM downtime.
- Configuration Management Without the Configuration: Piston Enterprise OpenStack is modeled after the most advanced system automation used by the pioneers of cloud computing at Amazon, Google and Microsoft. 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. Users simply hit the power button on a server that needs maintenance and MoxieHA handles configuration and service management during system boot, scale-up, upgrades and hardware failure. They can expand a cloud easily by adding new servers to the rack and connecting the networking cables.
- More Hardware Options: Piston Enterprise OpenStack is 100% interoperable with other OpenStack products and can be deployed on commodity hardware from x86 vendor, including IBM, Dell, Cisco, HP and Supermicro, in combination with network switching hardware.
"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," said Joshua McKenty, CTO and co-founder of Piston Cloud. "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."
Piston Enterprise OpenStack 2.0 is now in open beta and can be downloaded free for 90 days. After the 90-day free trial period, Piston Enterprise OpenStack is available through an annual software subscription license, which includes an automated, online update service, and access to 24×7 customer care.
Piston Cloud also provides training and professional services to support enterprise-level integration for custom authentication, audit and compliance, or monitoring solutions.
Comments
Born in 2011, Piston Cloud Computing already received two rounds of financial funding, $4.5 million in 2011 and $8 million last February, one investor being Cisco, the other ones including Data Collective and Swisscom Ventures join Divergent Ventures, Hummer Winblad and True Ventures.
The start-up is headquartered in San Francisco, CA and was founded by technical team leads from NASA and Rackspace. The executive team includes CEO Jim Morrisroe who replaced Joshua McKenty as CEO of the company last December 2012. Morrisroe served previously as VP and GM of Zimbra, a VMware company, and VP of sales at Storigen and Cemaphore Systems. Co-founder McKenty takes on a new role as CTO. Before Piston Cloud Computing, he was NASA Nebula chief technical architect. In the start-up there are also former Rackspace luminary Christopher MacGown and former NASA communications director Gretchen Curtis.
Its core product is Piston Enterprise OpenStack, a massively scalable private cloud OS built on OpenStack, with a focus on ease of use and advanced security features for regulated environments. The software is a bare-metal cloud OS that allows DevOps teams to deploy and manage an OpenStack private cloud without IT operations expertise or specialized appliances. Providing virtualized compute, storage, networking and management through self-service interfaces and APIs, it frees developers to focus on building applications rather than infrastructure.
It can be deployed on commodity hardware from almost any major x86 vendor and scales to tens of thousands of physical servers. It is interoperable with all other OpenStack public and private cloud environments, and also supports Amazon Web Services APIs.
Piston Cloud Computing has partnered with Silicon Mechanics, provider of rackmount server, storage, and HPC solutions to create an hardware solution. Silicon Mechanics pairs Piston Enterprise OpenStack with multiple cloud nodes, each of which features Xeon processors E5-2600 Series, DDR3-1600 memory, 10GbE connectivity, SSD storage, and redundant power supplies.
Concerning storage, the company said: "True high-availability requires a flexible shared storage fabric. Enterprise OpenStack delivers this, out of the box, using Ceph, a commercially-supported open source distributed software storage solution. Using MoxieHA, we automate the provisioning and management of your underlying Ceph devices. Using a null-tier architecture approach, this delivers a complete virtual SAN solution using nothing but direct-attached drives off of the same servers that provide capacity for your virtual machines. For best performance, we recommend using SSDs in JBOD mode for this converged storage, and allowing Ceph and MoxieHA to manage redundancy and replication. Enterprise OpenStack also supports pass-through mode, allowing you to take advantage of existing infrastructure with more traditional RAID-based SAS or SATA equipment."
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