Airframe from Piston Cloud is ideal for pilot deployments, proof of concepts and lab environments

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 22 — Piston Cloud Computing, Inc., the enterprise OpenStack company, today announced the release of Airframe, a slimmed-down version of its flagship product, Piston Enterprise OpenStack. Airframe is a bare-metal cloud management platform that installs in less than 10 minutes and delivers 100 percent of the core OpenStack services, including compute, storage, networking and cloud management. With Airframe, business users now have an easy, comprehensive, and free way to evaluate and become comfortable with OpenStack in a pre-production environment.

Airframe was designed to fill the gap between the OpenStack framework and Piston Enterprise OpenStack, Piston Cloud's highly available, production-ready, hardened and supported OpenStack distribution. At its core, Airframe is the same technology powering Piston Enterprise OpenStack, which delivers virtual machines, block storage, scale-out object storage and virtualized networking, through a self-service web portal and a set of open standard APIs.

Comprehensive Cloud Management Platform

For a Proof of Concept (POC) to be successful, it needs to be both comprehensive, and congruent with the final design. Before Airframe, it wasn't possible to evaluate all of the core OpenStack services without installing and configuring several different systems. With Airframe, users can deploy a complete OpenStack environment that runs everything required for an application-development cloud, including object and block storage. In addition to OpenStack, Airframe comes bundled with Cloud Foundry, the world's most popular open source Platform-as-a-Service, to deliver a truly turn-key application development cloud experience.

Airframe features include:

• Moxie HA
• Hands-free 10-minute installation
• Push-button upgrades
• Cloud Foundry integration
• Your choice of hardware
• All OpenStack core components (including swift and nova-volumes)
• An integrated distributed storage system (powered by Ceph)

Production Architecture

Airframe is the ideal solution for pilot deployments, POCs and lab environments. Built on the same underlying technology as Piston Enterprise OpenStack, Airframe comes packaged with a per-user entitlement key allowing interested Airframe users to easily upgrade to Piston Cloud's production-ready paid product, Piston Enterprise OpenStack.

"OpenStack installers on the market today are either too complicated to deploy and manage, or just not a complete solution," said Joshua McKenty, CEO and co-founder of Piston Cloud Computing. "We felt it was important to provide an 'easy' method of installing OpenStack that didn't require sacrificing a production-class architecture. Users can upgrade from a pilot deployment to a fully-supported production environment without having to start over. We believe that's a really significant difference. With Airframe we can give people a truly seamless experience from a free to paid and supported solution."

Free, as in Love and Beer

Airframe can be used without limitation: on an unlimited number of servers, for an unlimited time, with an unlimited number of users. The license excludes operation as a publicly-available commercial service, or for commercial resale. Just like Piston Enterprise OpenStack, Airframe runs on commodity hardware.

Availability and Support

On Aug. 27, 2012, Airframe will be available exclusively to 2012 VMworld Conference attendees, at Piston Cloud's booth #2337. Airframe will be generally available via download at http://airframe.pistoncloud.com on September 4, 2012.

Airframe is supported by Piston Cloud's update service, and through a set of community forums. Comprehensive enterprise-level support is available with an upgrade to Piston Enterprise OpenStack.

Enterprise features such as live migration, automated hands-free scale-out, as well as Gridcentric's virtual memory streaming (VMS) memory over-subscription and rapid instance cloning, is available only in Piston Enterprise OpenStack.

About Piston Cloud Computing, Inc.

Piston Cloud Computing, Inc. is the enterprise OpenStack company. Founded in early 2011 by technical team leads from NASA and Rackspace, Piston Cloud is built around OpenStack, the fastest-growing, massively scalable open cloud framework. Piston Enterprise OpenStack is the first fully-automated bare-metal cloud management platform built on OpenStack and the first OpenStack distribution specifically focused on security and easy operation of enterprise private clouds. Piston Cloud is based in San Francisco and funded by Hummer Winblad and True Ventures. Visit Piston Cloud online at http://www.pistoncloud.com.

-----

Source: Piston Cloud Computing, Inc.