Former NASA OpenStack researchers enter private cloud market with Piston Enterprise OS

Piston Cloud Computing co-founder Josh McKenty has laid out the same objective on several occasions, from speaking to attendees at the inaugural OpenStack design summit to addressing friends and colleagues at his company's launch party.

Piston Cloud Computing, the San Francisco-based company McKenty co-founded last year, recently released the first private cloud operating system based on OpenStack, the open source infrastructure-as-a-service framework that was first designed by a group of researchers, McKenty included, at NASA. For a company in other words less than 1 year old, McKenty is hoping its Piston Enterprise OS is the then and there step to fulfilling that goal.

McKenty says Piston Enterprise OS, if not known as PentOS, is designed to bring clients "private cloud that you can in fact use." Effectively, as McKenty described it, Piston Cloud Computing hopes to make PentOS similar to Linux, however for private cloud management. The company's aim is to provide an alternative option for private cloud management, during maintaining security, reliability and navigability for the IT managers tasked with overseeing the network.

The origin of Piston Cloud Computing as a company tells a lot about what it intends to do with its new OS. The motivation for PentOS stems from McKenty's work with NASA's Nebula Cloud Computing Platform, where he served as the technical architect on the original compute elements of OpenStack. Once he got past a bit of reluctance to take the job at NASA -- a result of his entrepreneurial spirit and the known limits of federal budgets -- he joined a group of researchers that would bring groundbreaking technology in an unlikely setting.

"We're at heart startup people and we did this impossible thing of running a startup inside the federal government, at kind of a period in the course of time where that was possible in a certain amazing way," McKenty says. "There was a lot of new optimism about the role the government could play in technology research."

"I didn't believe that OpenStack should be a chance to reinvent everything or change every part about how every business does IT because you can't get adoption there where it actually matters," McKenty says. "You've got to be able to make incremental progress, and a lot of in other words being able to tie into existing enterprise systems. There are all these examples around lost data, around authentication systems, and around cost visibility and accounting. These are boring things, however they're truly important boring things. And I guess I have this perverse mindset where I can get excited about solving boring problems."

"It's a pretty good match for what enterprises seem to want in terms of that marketplace, that diversity, that variety of choice in something like OpenStack, but with the enterprise credibility, a phone number and the true higher-level technical support that they might need as an enterprise," Lyman says. "I think that PentOS is a fairly good match for that sort of demand, you know, kind of the best of both worlds."

A key aspect of this reliability lies in the foundation of Piston Cloud Computing and where it came from, according to Lyman. "Piston has some impressive leadership," he says.

Colin Neagle covers Microsoft security and network management for Network World. Keep up with his blog: Rated Critical, follow him on Twitter: @ntwrkwrldneagle. Colin's email is cneagle@nww.com.

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