The developer preview of pentOS will be available on Oct. 3
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Enterprise OpenStack company Piston Cloud Computing (www.pistoncloud.com) launched on Tuesday, and debuted its cloud operating system for managing enterprise private cloud environments, pentOS.
The founders have been involved in the development of OpenStack since the beginning, as co-founder Joshua McKenty was the chief architect of the NASA Nebula project, which became half of OpenStack. Co-founder Christopher McGowan was at Slicehost and when it was acquired by Rackspace he joined the Rackspace cloud team.
“We actually really think of this as finishing what we started since both of us have been working on the things that became OpenStack for most of the last three years,” Piston Cloud CEO and co-founder Joshua McKenty says in a phone interview with the WHIR.
After completing a $4.5 million funding round in July, Piston is now a 17 person company headquartered in San Francisco. The Piston Cloud team has acquired talent from NASA and the OpenStack developer community, according to a press release.
Piston Cloud will launch its pentOS developer preview at the OpenStack Design Summit on October 3. The company aims for general availability at the end of November, and will make pentOS available to channel partners by the end of January 2012, McKenty says.
McKenty says the plan is to roll pentOS out gradually so that Piston Cloud can maintain high quality, high touch support.
“The specific focus for Piston Cloud is around the enterprise private cloud space. One of the things that was really interesting when we kicked off OpenStack was that it was targeting both public and private clouds but as it matured over the last 12 months, and really particularly last year, we didn’t see the enterprise needs really being addressed,” McKenty says. “There were so many folks that were excited about the possibilities for large scale public cloud environments that most of the attention seemed to be on the service provider side of the market. We really built out Piston Cloud to address that gap.”
pentOS is much more than just OpenStack, McKenty says. “It’s actually everything from the bare metal up,” he says.
“What we’ve done is we’ve really based the design of pentOS on how large private clouds are operated in places like Facebook or Twitter and not so much on how the enterprise private clouds were being deployed by other vendors. The key difference here is that you can build a pentOS cloud out of a single kind of server,” McKenty says.
Vendor lock-in is something that McKenty says pentOS prevents. Users of pentOS can connect and interoperate with any other public or private cloud powered by OpenStack, according to McKenty.
“On the open side, we’re really focused on making sure this runs across a lot of different commodity hardware vendors. We are going to market for the beta release with just a couple that we’ve certified, that we’ve been able to get early evaluation gear of and those are the Silicon Mechanic servers and the Arista network switches which we used at NASA and also which Rackspace has been using internally,” McKenty says. “We’re working now with Dell, HP and Cisco hardware to make sure that our customers can buy from whatever vendor they are most comfortable with.”
Another key feature of pentOS is the ability to scale “one server at a time” through its Null-Tier architecture, McKenty says. He says this feature is something customers are concerned about when planning private cloud evaluations.
“With a pentOS-based solution you can add capacity one server at a time and the advantages here are pretty obvious, not only on the capacity planning and capex side, as well as management, but you can also operate your cloud much closer to full efficiency because you don’t need to buy your capacity in these larger chunks,” McKenty says.
pentOS is packaged on what Piston Cloud calls the “cloud key” – a USB stick that plugs into a laptop and automates private cloud deployment when plugged into the top of rack switch, McKenty says.
“You edit a single configuration file that specifies your entire private cloud environment, all of the networking address to use, the administrative controls, enterprise authentication servers you should connect to for accounts and system monitoring,” McKenty says. “Then you pull that USB stick out, plug it into your top of rack switch, turn the top of rack switch on, and you walk away. Everything else is automated. We call this the 99.99 percent automated private cloud.”
The software on the cloud key allows the top of rack switch to detect every piece of hardware plugged into it, turn it on, install the base operating system, install OpenStack on top of it and then ensure the services are running, according to McKenty.
“It load-balances itself, it replicates the data, it distributes your workloads, you don’t have to get in and muck with anything.”
pentOS is also the industry’s first implementation of the CloudAudit standard, according to McKenty.
The CloudAudit standard exposes audit and assertion capabilities to external auditors from inside a cloud environment, according to McKenty.
“The cloud we built at NASA, the NASA Nebula platform, was the first FISMA-certified cloud environment ever and it was a mess to achieve that certification without a well-defined standard for how to do it, we had to make it up,” McKenty says. “We’ve been really happy to move that forward and we’ve actually made CloudAudit a contribution to OpenStack.”
McKenty says the challenge in the cloud environment is that the auditing in a multi-tenant environment is impossible.
“The Cloud Audit standard was proposed to take place through an API rather than requiring auditors to log in to physical hardware and it does this by running agents on both the host and the guest environment that can report these assertions under well known, well-definied taxonomy.”
McKenty says that a lot of managed hosting providers, colocation providers and even unmanaged web hosts may not want to go “full boar on operating a public cloud on a large scale,” especially if they don’t have reserved capital. He says that the managed private cloud or the hosted virtual private cloud route could be a better fit if it fits in with what their customers derive from them as their special sauce. For example, he says, Rackspace customers appreciate its “fanatical support” while colocation providers like Equinix are more known for security.
About Nicole Henderson
Nicole Henderson writes full-time for the Web Host Industry Review where she covers daily news and features online, as well as in print. She has a bachelor of journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto, and has been writing for the WHIR since September 2010. You can find her on Twitter @NicoleHenderson.
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