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OpenStack

Piston Cloud Computing Scores $4.5 Million In Funding For Open Source Cloud

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Piston Cloud Computing, a software company developing commercialized OpenStack software for businesses, has raised $4.5 million in funding in a round led by Hummer Winblad and True Ventures, with Divergent Ventures and others participating.

Lars Leckie from Hummer Winblad, and Puneet Agarwal from True Ventures will join Piston’s board of directors.

Launched by NASA and Rackspace in 2010, OpenStack is the fastest-growing open-source project in the world, with over 1,100 contributors and 82 participating companies, including Rackspace, NASA, Citrix, Intel, Cisco, Arista Networks and Dell.

Piston’s co-founders actually came from the technical teams at NASA and Rackspace, and helped to create the OpenStack project in 2010.

Piston’s CEO, Joshua McKenty, was the Cloud Architect of NASA’s Nebula Cloud infrastructure, the precursor of OpenStack’s cloud computing component, and holds an appointed seat on OpenStack’s Policy Board.

Piston’s CTO, Christopher MacGown, was a Technical Lead at SliceHost, acquired by Rackspace in 2008. In addition, the team has recruited some of the best talent from the OpenStack community, including core contributors from NASA and other participating organizations.

Piston Cloud technology is currently in limited beta, with a public release expected in Q4 2011.

Citrix Commercializes OpenStack With ‘Project Olympus’

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Citrix will soon be rolling out a new OpenStack product that would let customers build private or public clouds. The company has added Project Olympus, a new cloud product, to its open cloud computing portfolio to complement its Citrix NetScaler Cloud Gateway and NetScaler Cloud Bridge.

Citrix Systems announced Project Olympus, a new cloud infrastructure product based on the open-source cloud operating system OpenStack, at Citrix Synergy a few weeks ago. It will be the first commercialized version of OpenStack and will begin shipping later this year, Citrix said.

Based on OpenStack, Project Olympus will help customers build real infrastructure-as-a-service clouds that are scalable, efficient and open by design because they use the same architecture, approach and technology behind “some of today’s largest and most successful clouds in the world,” Citrix added.

Project Olympus will be composed of two components, a Citrix-certified version of OpenStack and a cloud-optimized version of Citrix XenServer. It will support a wide range of infrastructure, management and development technologies to make it easy for customers to expand and build on the platform, Citrix said.

Project Olympus will also support Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere in addition to Citrix XenDesktop.

OpenStack began as a joint effort between Rackspace and NASA back in July 2010. The effort has since expanded to include more than 70 industry partners, including Citrix. OpenStack supports multiple virtualization hypervisor platforms, including Hyper-V, KVM and Xen.

rPath X6 Now Supports OpenStack And VMware vCloud Director

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rPath has announced that rPath X6 now supports OpenStack and VMware vCloud Director for private and hybrid cloud computing environments.

OpenStack is the open source cloud operating system and emerging open cloud standard backed by more than 50 organizations and contributors across the globe. VMware vCloud Director allows enterprises and service providers to build and operate secure clouds.

With this announcement, rPath’s system automation and standardization features can be combined with OpenStack’s elasticity and vCloud Director’s requisition, approval and provisioning capabilities to provide customers with a tangible means of requesting, deploying, maintaining and dynamically scaling a complete IT system.

rPath is a founding member of the NRE Alliance, a coalition of independent vendors collaborating to deliver a solution for enterprise cloud computing by enabling capabilities for self-service, automation and elasticity. Other members of the NRE Alliance include newScale, Eucalyptus Systems and MomentumSI.

Rackspace Launches ‘Cloud Builders’ To Support OpenStack Cloud Deployments

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Organizations deploying OpenStack, the open source cloud operating system, can now receive formal service and support offerings from Rackspace, which has announced Rackspace Cloud Builders, a new business that will offer training and certification, deployment services, and ongoing support to enterprises and service providers.

Rackspace will extend its commitment to customer service beyond the company’s datacenters to stand behind any OpenStack cloud deployment.

Rackspace Cloud Builders brings together the foremost OpenStack experts from the team who built and operate the Rackspace Cloud and from the recent acquisition of Anso Labs, a professional services company that has helped large business and government organizations deploy and operate OpenStack Clouds.

The launch of Rackspace Cloud Builders and the acquisition of Anso Labs reinforces Rackspace’s investment in the success of OpenStack by driving adoption of the emerging open cloud standard.