Piston Cloud Computing, Inc., the enterprise OpenStack™ company, officially entered the market today to introduce pentOS™, an easy, secure and open cloud operating system for managing enterprise private cloud environments.

Building and Betting on OpenStack
Piston Cloud CEO and co-founder, Joshua McKenty, was technical lead and cloud architect of NASA’s Nebula Cloud Computing Platform, which formed the cornerstone of the OpenStack project, and currently holds an appointed seat on the OpenStack Project Policy Board. Christopher MacGown, co-founder and CTO, was technical lead at Slicehost, acquired by Rackspace® in 2008. The growing Piston Cloud team boasts experienced engineering talent from NASA and the broader OpenStack developer community.

OpenStack is the fastest-growing open source project in the world, with over 1,550 contributors and 110 participating companies including Rackspace, NASA, Citrix, Intel, Cisco, Arista Networks, Microsoft and Dell. OpenStack is proven and ready for enterprise prime time, and Piston Cloud is committed to driving the technology forward as a key member of the community – sharing knowledge, guidance, vision and code.

Introducing pentOS, Built for Easy, Secure and Open Enterprise Private Clouds
Piston Enterprise OS™ (pentOS) is the first enterprise OpenStack cloud operating system specifically focused on security and easy operation of private clouds. Piston’s patent-pending Null-Tier Architecture™ offers storage, compute and networking on every node for massive scalability.

Custom built to address regulatory requirements, pentOS represents the first enterprise implementation of CloudAudit, a cross-industry standard launched in early 2010 to automate the process of auditing cloud service providers, which has become the security standard for OpenStack.