Since the company first launched back in January 2011, Piston Cloud has built a solid reputation within the OpenStack community. The company was founded by key individuals involved in the cloud market early on, folks like Joshua McKenty, former NASA Nebula chief technical architect; Christopher MacGown, former Rackspace luminary working on its Cloud Servers infrastructure cloud; and Gretchen Curtis, former communications director for the CTO office at NASA.
When many core OpenStack developers who worked on the original Nebula cloud project at NASA broke away, quite a few of them ended up joining McKenty at Piston Cloud to continue what they started.
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Piston Cloud quickly kicked into first gear with a Series A funding round of $4.5 million in June 2011; it followed up more recently in February 2013 with a Series B round of $8 million to reach its goal to further the natural evolution of the OpenStack project while focusing on meeting the needs of the enterprise.
This month, the company is ready to make good on that promise. Less than two weeks ago, the company delivered its turnkey Piston Enterprise OpenStack 2.0 distribution, created to provide an organization with a relatively easy way to start building and managing its own OpenStack cloud deployment.
According to the company, the new 2.0 release will allow for more available storage hardware options and less rigid software while moving to a more recent version of the OpenStack code. With this latest version, Piston Cloud is also targeting enterprise organizations that want to end their dependency on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and instead fulfill their own cloud needs internally.
Jim Morrisroe, CEO of Piston Cloud, said the company's software will allow an organization to take full advantage of OpenStack without the administrative complexity, so they can focus on building and deploying applications instead of spending time on their infrastructure.
Morrisroe continued, "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's Enterprise OpenStack 2.0 is based on an older version of OpenStack, the Folsom release that came out last September. The company decided to stick with the Folsom release rather than use the more recent Grizzly build of OpenStack, which reached general availability weeks ago. The reason for that, according to Piston Cloud: The company is aiming for a more production-level stability and reliability platform rather than forcing customers to live on the bleeding edge of technology.
It's also important to remember that while OpenStack forms the core of the Piston Cloud solution, there are many other important components that allow it to separate itself from the pack -- and let the company use the catchphrase, "more than just OpenStack."