Piston Cloud launches OpenStack distribution Airframe

Piston Cloud has announced Airframe, a free OpenStack distribution for private clouds which it says should be ideal for pilot deployments, proof-of-concept projects and lab environments. Although built from the open source OpenStack product, Airframe itself is only free to use, rather than open source, and is designed as a stepping stone to Piston Cloud's Enterprise OpenStack Cloud product; Airframe omits the enterprise product's secure update process, server reconfiguration and KVM clone/launch capabilities.

Airframe is designed to install onto bare metal systems and includes all of the core OpenStack services: compute, storage, networking and cloud management. It also includes Piston Cloud's Moxie HA high availability technology, integration with Cloud Foundry and a Ceph-powered distributed storage system. Airframe can be used on an unlimited number of servers for an unlimited time, but is specifically excluded from use on publicly-available commercial services or from being commercially resold. The software will be available from airframe.pistoncloud.com from 4 September.

Airframe will be competing with Rackspace Private Cloud and Red Hat's OpenStack Technology Preview, among others. OpenStack vendors see simplifying the process of evaluating OpenStack within private clouds as a route to lead potential customers to their own offerings, be it through additional software or through support options.

(djwm)