New Release of Piston OpenStack Announced 

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

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 attacks.
• 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.