Aptira pushes Piston for OpenStack

Managed hosting and Cloud provider Aptira has partnered with US company Piston Cloud Computing to deliver private clouds for Australian enterprises based on the open source OpenStack cloud computing project.

Aptira will be Piston's exclusive partner for delivering the Piston Enterprise OpenStack Cloud operating system in the Australian, New Zealand and Indian markets. The company will offer both on-premise private Clouds and managed hosting of private Clouds using Piston Enterprise OpenStack.

OpenStack is a collection of open source software for building public and private Clouds. It can be used either by providers who want to deliver infrastructure as a service to customers or enterprises that want a private Cloud for on-demand, self-service provisioning of compute services. The project is a product of collaboration between NASA and Rackspace, utilising the former's Nova compute engine and the latter's object storage system.

Open Source Spotlight - OpenStack: Building a more open Cloud

Piston Enterprise OpenStack can be used to build Clouds based on OpenStack, with Aptira touting cost savings of 30 per cent compared to employing leading proprietary software. However, Aptira CEO Tristan Goode said that organisations may be able to realise significantly greater savings when running Piston Enterprise OpenStack on commodity hardware.

"If you just put this on commodity boxes you can get a lot of the same functionality — redundancy across the boxes, and the same virtual machine performance — for significantly cheaper than with some non-open-source offerings," Goode said.

Aptira has a public Cloud offering that's currently in private beta, and Goode said part of the appeal of Piston Enterprise OpenStack will be the ability to shift between private OpenStack deployments and a public Cloud if organisations need scale up. "We [will be able to] give people flexibility that they can just shove it over into the public Cloud if it's something that needs that load capacity."

In April the much-anticipated Essex version of OpenStack was released, offering increased stability, improved integration, a unified authentication system and a dashboard system for self-service provisioning.