Piston Cloud
Piston Cloud Computing Inc., the enterprise OpenStack vendor, announced Monday that it has entered into an exclusive licensing agreement with Gridcentric, the virtualization optimization company. Every Piston Enterprise OS software license now includes Gridcentric's Virtual Memory Streaming (VMS) technology, delivering an easier, more affordable approach to Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). This partnership also marks the initial commercially available VDI solution built on OpenStack, the world's leading open source cloud framework.
Founded in 2009, Gridcentric has developed game-changing virtualization technology for the cloud and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) markets. Gridcentric is a privately held company with offices in Toronto, Canada and Santa Clara, California and has received investments from Rogers Venture Partners, the venture capital arm of Rogers Communications Inc., Citrix Systems, the Investment Accelerator Fund (IAF) and the Ontario Centre of Excellence (OCE).
Founded in early 2011 by technical team leads from NASA and Rackspace, Piston Cloud's technology is built on OpenStack, a massively scalable open source cloud framework. The company's core product, Piston Enterprise OS is a fully-automated cloud operating system built on OpenStack, and is specifically focused on security and the easy operation of enterprise private cloud environments. Piston Cloud is based in San Francisco and funded by Hummer Winblad, True Ventures and Divergent Ventures.
"Until now, there have been several challenges to VDI adoption in the enterprise, including prohibitive costs, security issues and complexity," said Joshua McKenty, co-founder and CEO of Piston Cloud. "Bundling VMS technology with Piston Enterprise OS doubles the virtual machine density per server, requiring less physical RAM without any impact to user customization or application performance. This is the first truly affordable, easily-managed OpenStack VDI solution available."
Piston Enterprise OS software automates 99 percent of IT systems management tasks and eliminates the need for a separate storage solution, delivering an easy and affordable way to deploy and manage an OpenStack private cloud environment behind the firewall. Gridcentric's VMS technology allows cloud users to scale their virtual infrastructure automatically and instantaneously, while substantially reducing memory requirements.
Gridcentric's VMS brings a new level of optimized resource allocation, elasticity and scalability to Piston Enterprise OS. Together, Piston Cloud and Gridcentric will unify the disparate components of IT infrastructure, helping enterprise buyers tackle bring-your-own-device (BYOD) challenges and making VDI simpler to deploy and manage, at a much lower CAPEX than competing solutions.
"Piston Cloud has been at the center of driving innovation and adoption of the OpenStack project and we're excited to be partnering with them," said Eric Shefler, CEO of Gridcentric. "The combination of Gridcentric's VMS technology with Piston Enterprise OS allows us to offer customers an extremely flexible, dynamic and affordable VDI solution."
