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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.

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.

Rackspace Acquires Server Management Platform Startup Cloudkick

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Hosting company Rackspace is acquiring startup Cloudkick, which offers a server management system to businesses. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Cloudkick, based in San Francisco, boasts more than 1,500 customers and has more than 1 million servers pass through its tools.

In the coming months, Cloudkick’s offering will be integrated into the Rackspace family of products.

And for some good news:

To “kick” things off, starting today, all basic monitoring checks (HTTP, HTTPS, PING/ICMP, SSH, DNS, and TCP) are now 100% free on an unlimited number of servers for all our accounts — from the free forever developer account to our 1000 server plan.

For more information, check Cloudkick’s FAQ on the topic.

(Source: TechCrunch)

Rackspace Private Cloud Leverages VMware For Enterprise Computing Offering

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Rackspace Hosting, has announced its new Private Cloud offering, which allows customers to run the centrally managed VMware virtualisation platform on private dedicated hardware environments.

Rackspace recognises the demand from enterprises for a more flexible and scalable hosting solution. Although multi-tenant cloud solutions are very flexible and cost-effective, they are not always right for every segment. The Rackspace Private Cloud’s single-tenant architecture offers increased control and security, while still maintaining the scalability, flexibility and resource optimisation that make shared cloud offerings so compelling.

Rackspace Private Cloud is an evolution of its popular dedicated virtual server (DVS) offering within the managed hosting business unit. In the last year, revenue from virtualisation solutions has grown substantially, driven mainly by the increased flexibility, improved asset utilisation and lower capital and operating costs that VMware’s virtualisation provides.

Rackspace Leverages VMware With Private Cloud Offering

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Rackspace Hosting today announced its new Private Cloud offering, which allows customers to run the centrally managed VMware virtualization platform on private dedicated hardware environments. Rackspace recognizes the demand from enterprises for a more flexible and scalable hosting solution. Although multi-tenant cloud solutions are very flexible and cost-effective, they are not always right for every segment. The Rackspace Private Cloud’s single-tenant architecture offers increased control and security, while still maintaining the scalability, flexibility and resource optimization that make shared cloud offerings so compelling.

Rackspace Private Cloud is an evolution of its popular dedicated virtual server (DVS) offering within the managed hosting business unit. In the last year, revenue from virtualization solutions has grown substantially, driven mainly by the increased flexibility, improved asset utilization and lower capital and operating costs that VMware’s virtualization provides.

The new Rackspace Private Cloud offering provides new pricing and configuration options that further extend the value for customers. The savings for customers can be substantial and further cost reductions can be achieved by the ability to quickly provision, deploy and take down virtualized server instances, using only what is needed. As with all Rackspace products, Private Cloud is backed-up by Rackspace’s Fanatical Support.

Rackspace Acquires Cloud Providers Slicehost And Jungle Disk

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Rackspace Hosting today announced it has acquired privately owned VPS provider Slicehost, and storage provider Jungle Disk. (hat tip to TechCrunch)

The purchase price of the combined acquisitions is approximately $11.5 million payable in cash and stock, with the potential for up to $16.5 million in additional payouts of cash and stock based on certain performance criteria.

Rackspace is one of the largest providers of dedicated servers. Recently it has also moved into the virtualization world through partnerships with VMware and its own “cloud” division Mosso. Today’s announcement further shows that traditional hosting companies anticipate a growing importance of virtualization-based solutions.

Slicehost is one of the leading providers of Xen-based virtual servers. They cater mostly to developer crowds. In two years they have managed to build a customer base that runs more than 15.000 virtual servers.

Jungle Disk is a provider of storage software that works in conjunction with Amazon’s S3 storage platform. Rackspace announced that it will gradually move over new customers to its own storage systems, but will continue to support Amazon S3 as well.

Rackspace owns 8 datacenters in the United States, Hong Kong and the UK, and further has sales offices througout Europe and South Africa.