Piston Cloud is one of the biggest supports of OpenStack out there. This is mainly because the company, which was founded by some of the people who’ve contributed the most to the project, based its flagship offering on the cloud OS. Piston has added proprietary components of its own to OpenStack and now offers it as a commercial distribution for private cloud deployments.

Today the company made a push to increase the appeal of its offering by announcing partnership with three of the biggest names in DevOps and automation:  Opscode, the maker of Chef, Puppet Labs and RightScale. Each offers customers different advantages, and now Piston’s clients are also included in that roster.

“Today’s private cloud solutions are poised to transform IT economics for the enterprise,” said Joshua McKenty, CEO and co-founder of Piston Cloud Computing, Inc. “Automation and orchestration are key to realizing the operational efficiencies of private cloud. By supporting solutions like Opscode Chef, Puppet Enterprise and RightScale myCloud, Piston Cloud’s customers have the ability to rapidly deploy and automate their applications within an OpenStack-powered environment.”

Piston is still a relatively new player, and it’s making some early progress to try and capture a head start in a small but growing market that will hopefully expand. This sort of approach ended up working out for Cloudera, among others.

PentOS, Piston Cloud’s product, rolled out into general availability just last month. Our news editor Kristen Nicole wrote up a feature about the company back when it first unveiled its plans in September last year, and dug a little deeper into the roots f the venture kicked off by NASA and Rackspace veterans.

Since then, more and more companies have made their commitments to OpenStack. One of them is Dell, which, just like competitor HP, is starting to pay more attention to the enterprise cloud space in light of a shaky PC consumer sector.