Piston Cloud Computing Tuesday released version 2.0 of Piston Enterprise OpenStack, a pre-configured cloud operating system based on the OpenStack project and loaded into a Piston cloud key memory device.
The customer sets a few configuration parameters on the cloud key memory stick, then inserts it into the USB port of a top-of-rack’s Ethernet switch. The system loads into the Linux server space of the switch, discovers the servers in the rack, and configures them into a system with virtual machine provisioning, pooled storage and networking and cloud management.
Not every enterprise network administrator is going to want to plug such a device into the heart of the his cloud network, lest someone one day exploit the practice and inject malware into the heart of his cloud. But Joshua McKenty, co-founder and CTO of Piston and a veteran of both the NASA Nebula project and Netscape 8 browser development, said Piston wanted to bring a foolproof, non-fragile version of OpenStack to market that installed without complications.
OpenStack is also available as sets of software modules found in the Ubuntu, Red Hat and Suse Linux distributions, but few would describe these versions of OpenStack as non-fragile from the moment the components are loaded onto the server.