Piston, Gridcentric Partner on OpenStack-Based VDI

Piston Cloud Computing announced an exclusive licensing agreement with Gridcentric, a virtualization optimization company, to include Gridcentric's Virtual Memory Streaming (VMS) technology in Piston Enterprise OS, which will support Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). The exclusive licensing agreement assists enterprises in delivering secure, low-cost virtual desktops without complexity, according to Piston Cloud.

“Until now, there have been several challenges to VDI adoption in the enterprise, including prohibitive costs, security issues and complexity,” said Joshua McKenty, co-founder and CEO of Piston Cloud. “Bundling VMS technology with Piston Enterprise OS doubles the virtual machine density per server, requiring less physical RAM without any impact to user customization or application performance.”

Piston Enterprise OS software enables its users to deploy and manage an OpenStack private cloud environments, automating nearly all of IT systems management tasks. Gridcentric’s VMS technology allows cloud users to scale their virtual infrastructure automatically and instantaneously, while substantially reducing memory requirements.

"Piston Cloud has been at the center of driving innovation and adoption of the OpenStack project and we're excited to be partnering with them,” said Eric Shefler, CEO of Gridcentric. “The combination of Gridcentric's VMS technology with Piston Enterprise OS allows us to offer customers an extremely flexible, dynamic and affordable VDI solution."

Founded in 2009, Gridcentric has developed virtualization technology for the cloud and VDI markets. Gridcentric is a privately held company with offices in Toronto, Canada and Santa Clara, California.