Nearly half a year after the Icehouse release of the OpenStack cloud computing platform hit general availability, Piston Cloud Computing Inc. has finally incorporated its improvements into the commercial distribution of its software for building private clouds on commodity servers. That means customers now have access to all the new features, performance enhancements and bug fixes included in the latest stable iterations of the project’s core components, namely Nova, Swift, Cinder, Glance, Neutron, Keystone, and Horizon.

But the update comes months after Piston’s biggest rivals upgraded their competing offerings to the most up-to-date edition of the open-source cloud operating system. Mirantis Inc., which fashions itself as the top pure-play distributor of OpenStack, became the first vendor to support Icehouse in June with the launch of version 5.0 of its namesake product, and Linux kingpin Red Hat Inc. snagged second place less than a month later.

SUSE Inc. only joined the club about three weeks ago but managed to make up for the delay with the addition of a high-availability option that currently stands alone in the marketplace. The feature is a key differentiator for the German firm now that more and more OpenStack users are moving into production, where maximizing uptime is key.

Yet despite being the latest to market with its version of Icehouse, Piston Cloud doesn’t have any big surprises in store for customers. Piston OpenStack 3.5 provides only a modest set of upgrades to go along with the improvements included in the upstream release, most notably an enhanced view of how much storage individual nodes consume. That increased visibility makes it possible for admins to allocate capacity based on the specific requirements of each instance rather than adopting the wasteful tactic of over-provisioning in case additional resources are necessary.

Additionally, the upgrade introduces integration with Intel Corp.’s Trusted Execution Technology (TXT), which checks code for potential security threats before running it and halts execution in the event that an anomaly is detected. The software covers the entire stack, from the firmware through the BIOS to the operating system and the hypervisors running on top of it, ensuring that no viruses or configuration-related vulnerabilities make it past boot.

Piston boasts that its platform is the first commercial OpenStack distro to take advantage of TXT. But Red Hat’s open-source alternative, which doesn’t fit into the “commercial” category because the company monetizes it indirectly via optional support contracts, has been compatible with the feature since 2013.

Lastly, Piston upgraded its premium zero-downtime update service to facilitate near-line updates. The enhancement is a boon for organizations in regulated industries such as healthcare and finance, but in the big picture, the latest version doesn’t do much to set itself apart from the competition. The fact that the startup came out with so little so late indicates that it’s having a hard time keeping up with larger rivals such as Red Hat, which have considerably more resources to invest in fleshing out their OpenStack distros.

The competitive divide is only set to increase as the leaders continue to race ahead while slower moving vendors find themselves falling further and further behind, a pattern that will inevitably result in consolidation just as has happened before in the Linux and Hadoop ecosystems. The only question is who will make it through the crunch.

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