Piston Cloud Computing, Inc., the enterprise OpenStack™ company, today announced a new release of Piston Enterprise OpenStack™, a turnkey, bare-metal cloud operating system for deploying and managing a private Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud environment. The industry’s first 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 best-of-breed storage, compute and networking virtualization through the OpenStack interfaces, with award-winning 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 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. VMS provides a unique instance cloning capability that allows users to launch and completely run additional virtual machines in less than a second.
• SDN Compatibility: Piston Enterprise OpenStack 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 easily 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 percent interoperable with other OpenStack products and can be deployed on commodity hardware from any major x86 vendor, including IBM, Dell, Cisco, HP and Supermicro, in combination with modern 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.”

Availability, Professional Services and Pricing
Piston Enterprise OpenStack 2.0 is now in open beta and can be downloaded free for 90 days at http://www.pistoncloud.com. 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 24x7 customer care.

Piston Cloud also provides training and professional services to support enterprise-level integration for custom authentication, audit and compliance, or monitoring solutions.