Terms were not disclosed.
Piston Cloud was founded by Josh McKenty, the lead architect of NASA's cloud platform, which spun off into the open-source OpenStack cloud operating system. Piston Cloud offers an OpenStack private cloud distribution designed for automated deployment, security and interoperability with public clouds that are also built on OpenStack.
Cisco says Piston Cloud's experience in distributed systems and automation will augment Cisco's Intercloud strategy of delivering a global network of interconnected clouds, and especially an OpenStack-based private cloud.
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Last September,Cisco acquired Metacloud, an operator of private OpenStack clouds for global enterprises. Metacloud offers an OpenStack-as-a-Service that remotely operates private clouds in a customer's data center.
Piston Cloud's employees will report into the Cisco Cloud Infrastructure and Managed Services Group, under Senior Vice President Faiyaz Shahpurwala. This acquisition is expected to close in Cisco's current fiscal fourth quarter.