Cisco Firing on All Pistons in OpenStack Cloud
Cisco, a company which was traditionally known for their network equipment, such as routers and switches just a few years ago has continued to further diversify their business over the last several years. In 2014, Cisco purchased Metacloud, an OpenStack as a Service company. In 2015, they have continued that vision, by announcing their intent to purchase Piston.
Piston, the creators of Piston Cloud OS, founded in 2011, is best known for Piston OpenStack, their easy to deploy and manage OpenStack distribution. Piston’s founders hail from both NASA and Rackspace, the birthplace of OpenStack itself. Beyond OpenStack, Piston also supports another number of platforms, such as Apache Spar and Hadoop. They had also planned to support Docker Swarm, Apache Mesos, and Kubernets in future releases.
Piston Cloud OS also boasts rapid orchestration, single click deployment, seamless scaling, and zero downtime upgrades of the environment. This provides powerful abilities to all of the supported platforms, especially OpenStack.
The Piston product suite ties into the Cisco Intercloud nicely, especially the Cisco OpenStack Private Cloud. The Cisco Intercloud seeks to provide a global network of clouds to provide a vast numbers of features, functinality, as well as options for Cisco customers. Networking can often be a critical piece of cloud deployments, whether they be public, private, or hybrid, and as well all know, Cisco has the expertise to provide seamless integration across environments for their customers.
Like many large corporations today, Cisco sees the power OpenStack can bring to its customers. Cisco seeks to provide an easy to manage and build OpenStack deployment for its customers. The Metacloud acquisition began this journey for them, with Metacloud’s technologies evolving into what customers now know was the Cisco OpenStack Private Cloud.
Besides incorporating even more seasoned cloud engineers into the Cisco OpenStack Private Cloud, Piston will also bring additional knowledge of automated deployment and operations frameworks. This will serve to further enhance the Cisco OpenStack Private Cloud offering. Cisco is serious about the cloud, especially OpenStack and this latest acquisition will make it even easier for Cisco customers to adopt these cutting edge technologies. For more about Cisco’s intent to purchase Piston, you can read Cisco’s press release.
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