Piston Launches CloudOS 4.0 to Expand Beyond OpenStack

Battle-tested Operating System for the modern data center now supports multiple frameworks and orchestration tools

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Apr 06, 2015, 08:00 ET

SAN FRANCISCO, April 6, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Piston Cloud Computing, Inc. today announced the availability of Piston CloudOS 4.0, an operating system for the modern data center that transforms clusters of commodity servers into a single unified environment. Used to deploy OpenStack in minutes, CloudOS 4.0 now allows customers and partners to also deploy Hadoop and Spark on bare metal, with forthcoming support for container orchestration tools such as Kubernetes, Mesos and Docker Swarm.

The technology behind CloudOS 4.0 has been deployed at scale and in production by hundreds of companies since 2011, including Swisscom, USDA, Zulily, and King Digital Entertainment. This announcement represents Piston's first expansion into a broader market beyond OpenStack.

"For the last four years, Piston has developed a platform that makes OpenStack deployment and operation extremely fast and easy. Now customers can use this platform, called CloudOS, to deploy other frameworks and orchestration tools as highly-available services, all on the same infrastructure," said Jim Morrisroe, CEO of Piston Cloud Computing. "Our vision is to make deploying the services that developers need as simple as downloading an app to your smartphone."

Tasked with implementing new technology frameworks and services to accomplish business goals, organizations often end up with fragment infrastructure silos. Not only do these silos limit their ability to reallocate resources as needed, but deploying on bare metal poses a significant technical and costly challenge for IT, while slowing time-to-market.

CloudOS simplifies and significantly speeds up the deployment and operation of modern technologies on bare metal, delivering choice, flexibility and ease of use. Piston CloudOS is the only holistic operating system for the modern data center that includes a host OS, software for boot, a resource manager and a services manager.

"As we explore various solutions within big data, cloud virtualization and container orchestration technologies, it is critical that we engage with forward-looking infrastructure and provisioning solutions that not only support currently available services, but also offers the flexibility to support concepts and services that will be available in the future," said Marco Hochstrasser, CEO of Swisscom Cloud Lab. "The Piston CloudOS data center operating system is a flexible way of making it very easy to deploy and manage these kind of services, quickly and seamlessly."

Key benefits of Piston CloudOS 4.0 include:

Piston CloudOS enables push-button deployment of services such as Hadoop, Spark and OpenStack with upcoming rollouts of additional big data components and container orchestration solutions including Kubernetes, Mesos, Docker Swarm, MongoDB and Cassandra.
Piston CloudOS allows customers to seamlessly reallocate resources to multiple frameworks and services across the data center, on the fly, and ensure optimization of their infrastructure.
Piston CloudOS allows customers to monitor, adjust, scale, and optimize the cluster—giving unprecedented visibility into data center resources.

"Organizations today are faced with the challenge of effectively implementing new technologies, some of which are still taking shape, in their existing environments, which can typically be silod," said Jay Lyman, cloud platforms research manager for 451 Research. "By unifying the management of disparate resources and doing what it has done for OpenStack with other open source projects and services such as Hadoop, Spark and Kubernetes, Piston is helping organizations take advantage of the latest software in a way that doesn't slow them, but actually simplifies and speeds their management of infrastructure and tools."

Availability

General availability of CloudOS 4.0 is expected in Q2 2015. For more information, or to get early access, please visit: http://pistoncloud.com/start/.

Additional Supporting Quote

"Our Cloud business has been experiencing explosive growth over the last several years globally. With Piston CloudOS, we were able to set up our OpenStack environment in hours… this capability has been dramatic for us. This new founded technical advantage is now inspiring us to continue offering new applications and offerings to the market that we just couldn't have in the past without CloudOS. Having the flexibility and agility to quickly switch things up and meet our technical acceleration plans globally is a key differentiator of CloudOS and our business."- Steve Vaughan, vice president, CaaS Solutions, Interactive Intelligence

Additional Resources

About Piston

Founded in 2011, Piston Cloud Computing makes software that enables businesses of any size to quickly and easily deploy highly-available frameworks, services, and tools on commodity hardware, without wrestling with infrastructure plumbing. Customers like Swisscom, King Digital Entertainment, Intelemage, Radio Free Asia, and Zulily use Piston CloudOS™ to automate their IT operations and bring new software products to market faster. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and funded by True Ventures, Hummer Winblad, Swisscom Ventures, Cisco Systems, Inc., Data Collective, and Divergent Ventures. For more information, please visit: http://pistoncloud.com

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SOURCE Piston Cloud Computing, Inc.