Piston has released an OpenStack based cloud OS that allows enterprises to build and manage secure private cloud infrastructures. 
Piston Enterprise OS, or (pentOS) is a hardware agnostic OpenStack Linux distribution that utilizes the company’s Null-Tier architecture, combining storage, compute and networking on individual nodes to deliver high scalability at lower cost. This allows customers to “scale a high availability private cloud one server at a time,” the company announced Wednesday.
Piston’s CloudKey feature enables automated and hands-free installation and can be installed in less than 10 minutes, the company claims.
The OS also supports CloudAudit, an open security standard for cloud and virtualized environments.
OpenStack is a top open source project backed by Rackspace, NASA, Citrix, Intel, Cisco, AT&T, Microsoft, Dell and Arista. Red Hat’s Gluster is also a big OpenStack supporter. pentOS is designed to run with any OpenStack product including platforms from Dell and Arista and is interoperable with any OpenStack public cloud environment including Rackspace, Dell, Amazon, InterNap and AT&T.
Piston was founded last year by several creators of OpenStack, including former NASA Nebula Chief Technical Architect Joshua McKenty, former Rackspace guru Christopher MacGown and NASA Communications Director Gretchen Curtis.
The company’s cloud OS was originally expected to debut in late November, but is about six weeks late. No big deal. Most enterprises are still in the cloud planning process.
