SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- Piston Cloud Computing, Inc., the enterprise OpenStack™ company, today announced the general availability of Piston Enterprise OS™ (pentOS™), an easy, secure and open cloud operating system for managing enterprise private cloud environments.

OpenStack is the fastest-growing open source project in the world, with over 2,321 contributors and 147 participating companies including Rackspace, NASA, Citrix, Intel, Cisco, AT&T, Arista Networks, Microsoft and Dell. OpenStack is proven and ready for the enterprise and Piston Cloud plays a key role in driving the technology forward -- sharing knowledge, guidance, vision and code.

Piston Enterprise OS™ is the first OpenStack distribution specifically focused on security and the easy operation of enterprise private clouds. Piston Cloud's innovative Null-Tier Architecture™ combines storage, compute and networking on every node to deliver massive scalability with unprecedented cost efficiency. Custom built to address regulatory requirements, Piston Enterprise OS also represents the industry's first implementation of CloudAudit, an open security standard for cloud and virtualized environments. Furthermore, pentOS is hardware vendor agnostic, ensuring users aren't locked in to a single proprietary architecture and that the system integrates seamlessly with products from companies like Intel, Dell and Arista.

Piston Enterprise OS is built to be easy, secure and open:

Easy

• pentOS can be installed in less than 10 minutes, and provides automatic security updates via a simple subscription service.
• Groundbreaking Null-Tier Architecture allows customers to easily scale a high-availability private cloud, one server at a time.
• 24x7 enterprise-level support.

Secure

• Piston CloudKey™ delivers 99.999% automated and hands-free installation of the pentOS software to servers and switches.
• Operating on a custom-built Linux distribution, pentOS minimizes security exposure and optimizes performance.
• pentOS is the industry's first enterprise implementation of CloudAudit.

Open

• pentOS is vendor agnostic and built to open standards, with a modular design that allows for integration with legacy and third-party technologies.
• Customers can grow their private cloud using commodity hardware.
• pentOS is interoperable with any other OpenStack-based public cloud environment, including Rackspace, Dell, Amazon, Internap, AT&T and others.

"As we continue to see security lag in the public cloud environment, it is clear that private cloud is really the only option for organizations dealing with large volumes of regulated data," said Joshua McKenty, CEO and co-founder of Piston Cloud. "To date, VMware was the only widely accepted option for private cloud, which brought with it associated cost, complexity and vendor lock-in. Piston Enterprise OS disrupts the market with the easiest, most secure and open approach to private cloud."

Pricing and Availability
With pricing starting at $3,500 per server, Piston Enterprise OS is available now at http://www.pistoncloud.com. For more information, contact sales@pistoncloud.com.

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 source cloud framework. Piston Enterprise OS™ (pentOS™) is the first OpenStack-based cloud operating system, and is specifically focused on security and the easy operation of enterprise private clouds. Piston Cloud is based in San Francisco and funded by Hummer Winblad, True Ventures and Divergent Ventures. Visit Piston Cloud online at http://www.pistoncloud.com.

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