Piston Cloud Computing, Inc. today announced a new release of
Piston OpenStack,
a software product that automates the orchestration of an entire
private cloud environment on x86 servers. Companies building web,
mobile, and big data applications use Piston's secure and cost-effective
Amazon Web Services (AWS)-like capabilities to bring new products to
market faster. By managing a group of servers as a single pool of
elastic and scalable computing resources, Piston OpenStack improves
datacenter efficiency thereby accelerating the application development
process.
In conjunction with today's product news, the company also introduced a simple-to-use Piston OpenStack TCO calculator that estimates the total cost of ownership of a Piston private cloud and allows customers to compare it to their AWS bill.
"For businesses in need of a scalable software
development environment, Piston OpenStack provides the same ease of use
and developer-centric features as AWS without the high price tag or
security concerns," said Jim Morrisroe, CEO of Piston. "If your AWS bill
has gone off the rails or public cloud isn't a fit for your business'
regulated environment, then Piston OpenStack is for you. Unlike
traditional on-premise solutions, Piston OpenStack is so easy to deploy
and manage that your complete app dev environment can be built in a
single day and virtually no ongoing operations support is required."
As customers
like Swisscom, Intelemage, Radio Free Asia, Solidify, and Zymergen have
discovered, Piston OpenStack frees software development teams from
operations management, giving them more time to build product and to
focus on writing code rather than managing operations.
Piston OpenStack 3.5: Better Security. Lower TCO.
Delivering compute, storage, networking, and management through
self-service interfaces and APIs, Piston OpenStack software includes a
hyper-converged hardware architecture, a highly-secure stateless
Micro-OS, and advanced cluster management.
Piston OpenStack provides elastic scaling of resources and fault
tolerance out-of-the-box, keeping infrastructure running by
automatically rebalancing resources and restarting tasks that have
failed. This delivers businesses an on-premise private cloud environment
that requires little to no IT operations. Built on the OpenStack
Icehouse release, new features of Piston OpenStack 3.5 include:
- Support for Icehouse. Customers can now leverage
the latest OpenStack Icehouse APIs and enhancements, fixes, and
performance updates for Nova, Swift, Cinder, Glance, Neutron, Keystone,
and Horizon.
- First commercial OpenStack software to support Intel Trusted Execution Technology (Intel TXT).
This feature provides a hardware-based root-of-trust to ensure that a
platform boots with a known-good configuration of firmware, BIOS,
virtual machine monitor, and operating system. Customers in highly
regulated or secure environments can now ensure their physical and
virtual resources are protected against attack.
- Additional options for rolling upgrades. Piston's zero-downtime update service now supports both online and near-line upgrades, for customers in regulated industries.
- Better cluster data insight. Greater visibility
into each node's storage profile enables customers to scale resources
incrementally, as needed, saving them money.
Piston OpenStack TCO Calculator
The light-weight TCO calculator
enables decision makers to input different values based on their
estimated private cloud requirements and preferred hardware vendors. The
result is a projection of the total cost of a Piston OpenStack private
cloud, amortized monthly. The online tool also includes an option for
users to then compare this estimated cost to their monthly AWS bill. The
TCO calculator is free and can be found online at http://pistoncloud.com/tco-calculator/.
Availability and Pricing
Piston OpenStack 3.5 is available now, and may be downloaded free for 60 days at http://pistoncloud.com/start.
After the 60-day free trial period, Piston OpenStack is available
through an annual software subscription license, which includes a
zero-downtime update service and access to 24×7×365 customer support.