Piston Cloud Releases OpenStack Distribution

There’s another OpenStack distribution entering the market, following hot on the heels of the release of Red Hat’s OpenStack distribution. Piston Cloud will be releasing at VMworld 2012 Airframe, a slimmed-down version of its Piston Enterprise OpenStack distribution.

Airframe is being distributed freely and is designed as a bare-metal cloud management platform for private clouds that, according to the company, installs in less than 10 minutes and delivers OpenStack services including compute, storage, networking and cloud management. The release of the new OpenStack distribution is meant to give businesses a free way to give OpenStack a try…


Piston Cloud noted that Airframe is built on the same framework as its Piston Enterprise OpenStack distribution, with the ability to provide to customers virtual machines, block storage, scale-out object storage and virtualized networking through a self-service web portal and a set of open standard APIs. According to the company, it wasn’t previously possible to evaluate all of OpenStack’s services without installing and configuring several different systems, and the promise around Airframe is to change that, providing the opportunity to let businesses kick the tires of OpenStack easily and without any cost.

“OpenStack installers on the market today are either too complicated to deploy and manage, or just not a complete solution,” said Joshua McKenty, CEO and co-founder of Piston Cloud Computing, in a prepared statement. “We felt it was important to provide an easy method of installing OpenStack that didn’t require sacrificing a production-class architecture. Users can upgrade from a pilot deployment to a fully supported production environment without having to start over. We believe that’s a really significant difference. With Airframe we can give people a truly seamless experience from a free to paid and supported solution.”

Whether it works as promised or not, it sounds good. Airframe has no limitations and can be installed on an unlimited number of servers for an unlimited time and for an unlimited number of users. There are some limitations in the license regarding publicly available cloud services and commercial, but otherwise, Airframe is ready to go — as of VMworld, anyway.