Piston Cloud, a company set up by the technical architect of NASA’s cloud computing infrastructure, has launched an open source "private cloud operating system" based on that system.
NASA built its own private cloud, named Nebula, in 2008. The US space agency contributed the code for Nebula’s "fabric controller", the component that managages server provisioning and monitoring, to the OpenStack open source cloud infrastructure project.
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Joshua McKenty, who was technical architect on the Nebula project, set up his own company Piston Cloud earlier this year. Today, the company unveiled Piston Enterprise OS (pentOS), which it describes as "an easy, secure and open cloud operating system for managing enterprise private cloud environments".
The company claims pentOS can be installed in minutes, is interoperable with any public cloud provider that supports OpenStack and is the first enterprise implementation of a system called CloudAudit, which allows public cloud customers to inspect their providers’ infrastructure.
"We plan to define the future of secure private cloud, while propelling OpenStack forward with ongoing and significant contributions to the open source codebase," McKenty said in a statement.
McKenty is not the only former NASA employee to have based a business on Nebula. Earlier this year, former chief technology officer for IT Chris Kemp set up a company, also named Nebula, which sells OpenStack cloud appliances.
