Piston Cloud Receives $8M in Investments for OpenStack Distribution

Piston Cloud Computing, a company which specializes in private cloud operating systems, announced on Wednesday that it has raised $8 million in order to distribute its OpenStack platform to available customers. The money was funded by Cisco Systems Inc., Data Collective, Swisscom Ventures, Divergent Ventures, Hummer Winblad (News - Alert), and True Ventures.

The OpenStack platform, according to Talkin’ Cloud, allows customers to build private or public clouds for their companies. Dell, HP and Rackspace (News - Alert) are regulating their public clouds on OpenStack.

Joe Morrisroe, Piston Cloud Computing’s CEO, said companies are not happy with the amount of money and customer service required from public clouds, which leads people to switch from public clouds to private clouds, according to an ITWorld.

"Right now some of the larger non-Piston clouds require a small army of professional services and consultants," said Morrisroe. "It shouldn’t be that hard. It should be highly automated, very non-IT intensive to operate."

According to SYS-CON Media, Piston received $4.5 million in series A funding in July 2011, which helped it launch the first commercial OpenStack distribution for building, scaling and managing a private Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud on bare-metal, converged commodity hardware.

The name of the next release in OpenStack’s cloud software, according to ZDNet, will be Grizzly. Grizzly is still under development, and is expected to be fully completed by April 2013.

The goal of Piston Cloud Computing is to provide a simple solution for public and private clouds through the use of APIs, or application programming interfaces.