Piston Cloud has rolled out Piston Enterprise OS, or pentOS, into general availability today.  The cloud platform is a refined, commercial version of OpenStack – the open-source cloud OS initiative originally kicked off by Rackspace and NASA.

PentOS offers a number of advantages to enterprises with private cloud deployments; first and foremost the fact that it’s open. The OS’s agnostic nature enables companies to integrate it with third party offerings, including public OpenStack-powered clouds such as those operated by Rackspace, Dell and other providers.  In addition, it can be deployed on just about any piece legacy hardware or multi-vendor environment.

PentOS is running on a Linux distribution specifically developed by Piston for this purpose, which adds another layer of security, according to the company.  And the cloud OS is making use of Null-Tier Architecture, yet another piece of Piston Cloud-developed technology.

The patented code combines storage, compute and networking in every node, making it easier to scale deployments and simplifying the product even further. Piston claims that PentOS can be installed within just 10 minutes.

“As we continue to see security lag in the public cloud environment, it is clear that private cloud is really the only option for organizations dealing with large volumes of regulated data,” said Joshua McKenty, CEO and co-founder of Piston Cloud. “To date, VMware was the only widely accepted option for private cloud, which brought with it associated cost, complexity and vendor lock-in. Piston Enterprise OS disrupts the market with the easiest, most secure and open approach to private cloud.”

We first learned about Piston Cloud’s commercial distribution of OpenStack in September. Our own Kristen Nicole covered the details, noting the background developments on this up and coming company.