CLOUD SOLUTIONS
Winner: Piston OpenStack v3.0
The biggest problem with OpenStack is that there aren't enough engineers around who know how to work on it. Softening the issue is Piston Cloud Computing's OpenStack, which automates the creation and deployment onto x86 servers of private cloud environments that all but run themselves. As least, that's the claim. In fact, the 2011 startup also said its new product can go from bare-metal to a fully operational OpenStack-based on-premise cloud with compute, storage and networking in less than a day, and requires no other software or per-server installation. Management of this hyper-converged hardware architecture, stateless Micro-OS and advanced clustering is provided through self-service interfaces and APIs. The tool also provides elastic resource scaling and fault tolerance.