Mirantis and Piston Deliver New OpenStack Upgrades

Mirantis, which has been expanding its set of training, support and development initiatives surrounding the OpenStack cloud computing platform, today announced the launch of Mirantis OpenStack Express 2.0. The offering now enables enterprises to deploy the most current OpenStack edition, OpenStack Icehouse as an enterprise-grade cloud service. The new release simplifies the setup process by providing a minimal Web form.

Also arriving now is Piston Cloud Computing's OpenStack distribution version 3.5.  It features commercial add-ons including support for Intel Trusted Execution Technology and a rolling-upgrade plan that is similar to how Red hat regularly updates its OpenStack platform.

According to Mirantis' announcement:

"Mirantis OpenStack Express 2.0, an on-demand Private-Cloud-as-a-Service (PCaaS), offers the Mirantis OpenStack distribution for enterprises searching for ease, reliability, agility, and zero lock-in in the cloud...To learn more about Mirantis OpenStack Express, attend a live demo, or sign up for a free trial, please visit https://express.mirantis.com/ or the OpenStack Foundation Marketplace."

"Mirantis OpenStack Express is the fastest way to get to production with a managed Mirantis OpenStack environment," said Adrian Ionel, Mirantis CEO, in a statement. "Enterprises no longer face the hassle of integrating hardware and software or worry over how to make OpenStack work. With Mirantis, they can focus on what they do best: building and running applications."

The new release of Piston OpenStack is billed as "a software product that automates the orchestration of an entire private cloud environment on x86 servers."

"By managing a group of servers as a single pool of elastic and scalable computing resources, Piston OpenStack improves datacenter efficiency thereby accelerating the application development process," the announcement adds.

In conjunction with its product news, Piston also introduced an interesting  OpenStack TCO calculator that estimates the total cost of ownership of a Piston private cloud and allows customers to compare it to their AWS bills.

“For businesses in need of a scalable software development environment, Piston OpenStack provides the same ease of use and developer-centric features as AWS without the high price tag or security concerns,” said Jim Morrisroe, CEO of Piston, in a statement. “If your AWS bill has gone off the rails or public cloud isn’t a fit for your business’ regulated environment, then Piston OpenStack is for you. Unlike traditional on-premise solutions, Piston OpenStack is so easy to deploy and manage that your complete app dev environment can be built in a single day and virtually no ongoing operations support is required.”