Piston Herds Cows with Enterprise OpenStack 2.0 Cloud

Grazed from Datamation. Author: Sean Michael Kerner.

While working for NASA as a cloud architect, Joshua McKenty helped to build the Nebula compute project and start the OpenStack open source cloud platform. McKenty has since gone on to found Piston Cloud computing, which launched its first public release in September of 2011. Piston is now updating its OpenStack solution in a 2.0 release that aims improve and ease the management of cloud deployments.

"We are still the better, faster, easier way to get up and running with OpenStack," McKenty told Datamation. McKenty’s vision for an enterprise OpenStack company has been greeted by an influx of $12.5 million in venture capital. Among Piston’s investors is networking giant Cisco Systems. "When we said we were an OpenStack company, people assumed that what is in our product is OpenStack and that’s it," McKenty said…

Reality is the while OpenStack forms the core of the Piston solution, there are many other important components. Piston includes the open source OpenStack command line tools, dashboard and the services layer that provide APIs. McKenty added that in order for the core of OpenStack to be valuable, it needs resource pools. To that end, Piston Enterprise OpenStack 2.0 includes Ceph for object and block storage. Ceph is an open source filesystem that is now backed by a commercial startup called Inktank…

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