OpenStack has been around for over a year now, racking up some pretty high profile partners especially in the past few months.  And as the ecosystem continues to mature, we begin to see some product launches around RackSpace’s open source initiative.  Piston Cloud is officially launching today, introducing pentOS for the enterprise.  It’s an open cloud operating system for managing enterprise private cloud environments, looking to offer the best of both worlds to its users.

The brainchild of co-founder and CEO Joshua McKenty, Piston is a cherished project with a deep-seated understanding of the OpenStack platform.  McKenty is a former RackSpacer, and was also the technical lead and cloud architect of NASA’s Nebula Cloud Computing Platform, upon which the OpenStack project was built.  Along with other Rackspace alum including Christopher MacGown (Piston co-founder and CTO), the Piston team is well-versed in open source cloud technology, but more specifically the OpenStack platform.

Growing a worldwide community with over 1,450 contributors and over 100 participating companies, OpenStack is certainly a supported initiative that’s recognized for its velocity.  And with that comes a demand to see the proof in the pudding, with Piston emerging as an early OpenStack product out to demonstrate it’s ready for prime time.  Piston’s got a head start in this regard, and is in a good position to become a leader in this sector.  It’s first product is pentOS.

Piston Enterprise OSTM (pentOS) is the first enterprise OpenStack cloud operating system focused on security and private cloud operations.  Using Piston’s patent-pending Mull-Tier Architecture, clients receive storage, compute and networking on every node for massive scalability.  It’s custom built to address regulatory requirements and other concerns many enterprises have with cloud solutions.  Enabling companies to better manage big data, pentOS is the first enterprise implementation of CloudAudit, a cross-industry standard that came out in 2010 to automate auditing cloud processes.

The Null-Tier Architecture is really the point of interest with pentOS, addressing the complexity of hardware while optimizing on the software side, through automation for integration to maintain security as well.  It aims to get rid of the middle tier all together, taking advantage of the cloud without this new breed of systems operations.  It gives pentOS a nice little bundle called the Cloud Key, a USB stick that configures everything for you once you plug it into the stack.  “We call it the insider attack,” McKenty says.  “Most security breaches come from folks that work inside of the company.  The fewer that have administrative credentials on hardware, the more secure it is.  That’s just a starting point.”

Piston Cloud has a lot it’s looking to do moving forward, helping to bring OpenStack solutions to the enterprise while addressing their security concerns as well.  In doing so, Piston marks an effort to validate the OpenStack platform, which is just now building a market around its initial offering.

“There are so many people involved in [OpenStack] that any individual perspective is going to be wrong,” McKenty says.  “And I still have no grasp of what’s happening–OpenStack is unbelievably global…the timing is so serendipitous.  It’s the right thing at the right time, pointing in the right direction.  This will be one of those things like the Internet.  No one knows who invented it.”