Piston Cloud Computing will sell an OpenStack distribution that offers automation for easy deployment, security features to meet the needs of security-conscious businesses and interoperability with public clouds that are also built on OpenStack.

"The rationale for starting the company is that the options for deploying private clouds are complicated, hard to configure, time-intensive to maintain and don't necessarily scale terribly well," said Joshua McKenty, CEO of Piston Cloud and formerly cloud architect and technical lead at NASA.

While many of the contributors to OpenStack have started businesses around public clouds, McKenty wanted to be sure that enterprises could also use OpenStack so that public and private clouds could be interoperable. He also wanted to be sure there were products meeting the unique challenges that enterprises face around security, regulatory compliance and integration with other enterprise systems. "It's a different beast than a public provider," he said.

PentOS is designed to include all the software required to run a private cloud, from the "bare metal" up, he said. It starts with a Linux distribution that only includes the components required to run OpenStack, an OpenStack distribution and a suite of automation tools.

It's designed to be used with low-cost server and hardware components, he said.