Cisco Acquires Piston Cloud Computing

Moving to make it simpler to deploy OpenStack on both private and public cloud, Cisco (CSCO) today announced it is acquiring Piston Cloud Computing.

Faiyaz Shahpurwala, senior vice president for the Cisco Cloud Infrastructure and Managed Services Group, says the primary driver of the acquisition is a desire to wrap higher level cloud automation tools around the set of IT automation tools for physical IT infrastructure that Cisco gained when it acquired Metacloud last year.

As envisioned by Cisco, Shahpurwala says the technology that Piston Cloud Computing rolled out with the release of Piston CloudOS 4.0, which not only automates deployments of OpenStack, but also application frameworks such as Hadoop.

In terms of how Cisco is going about support OpenStack itself there are two main avenues. For organization building their own cloud Cisco has partnered with Red Hat to support its distribution of OpenStack. At the same time, however, IT organizations that opt for OpenStack delivered as a service from Cisco will receive a distribution of OpenStack that was originally developed by Metacloud.

Managed by Cisco, Shahpurwala says that latter distribution of Hadoop can be deployed on premise, in hosted environment or on any one of Cisco’s Intercloud public cloud partners. At the moment there is a lot of debate over the degree to which OpenStack can scale in traditional enterprise IT environments. But Shagpurwala says that with the right OpenStack distribution in place it’s already been proven that OpenStack can scale. However, given all the moving parts attached to OpenStack many organizations are finding it simpler to have Cisco push out a certified OpenStack platform to them versus building their own from the ground up.

In terms of enterprise IT it’s becoming increasingly apparent that the provisioning of not only OpenStack and other cloud frameworks is about to become a whole lot more automated, so too will the applications running on top of them. The implications for those advances from a solution provider perspective may be nothing less than profound. The simpler it becomes to deploy entire stacks of cloud applications the less amount of revenue there will be generated by providing technical services. At the same time, end customers should see faster time to value, which in turn would theoretically lead them to invest in deploying even more cloud applications.

To what degree IT organizations actually embrace IT automation remains to be seen. But whatever the level of embrace the days of manually configuring every little thing the data center are clearly about to come to a close.