Piston To Fire Up OpenStack
Piston Cloud Computing, a brand-new company founded in part by Joshua McKenty, who served as chief technical architect for Nebula at NASA, is designed to help IT adopt the OpenStack cloud operating system. Nebula is a NASA-backed Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform, while OpenStack is a full OS aimed at massive scalability. Other founders were involved with OpenStack as former Rackspace employees.
Before I get into the technology, I want to talk about the company itself. The executive team is not only highly accomplished, but the exec photos are, um, unusual to say the least. Their bios talk about eclectic interests such as juggling, making handmade instruments, reading 16th- and 17th-century philosophy, and engaging "in any recreational and/or social activity that doesn't involve direct exposure to sunlight."
The company offers an OpenStack-based OS called pentOS, which it claims can be set up and running in 10 minutes. Like Windows, software updates are delivered automatically. Perhaps the biggest part of the business is enterprise support, which is offered every day, 24 hours a day.
Do you have a favorite cloud startup? If so, sing their praises by writing [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 10/11/2011 at 12:47 PM