Piston Cloud is about to release Airframe, a cut-down version of its Piston Enterprise OpenStack platform built so business users have a free way to evaluate and get comfortable with OpenStack in a pre-production environment.

It's supposed to be ideal in pilot deployments, proof of concept and lab environments.

The bare-metal cloud management platform is said to install in less than 10 minutes - which, if true, is probably remarkable - and deliver all the core OpenStack services including compute, storage, networking and cloud management.

The company says it was designed to fill the gap between the OpenStack framework and Piston Enterprise OpenStack, its production-ready and supported OpenStack distribution.

Evidently before Airframe, it wasn't possible to evaluate all of the core OpenStack services without installing and configuring several different systems. With Airframe, users can deploy a complete OpenStack environment that runs everything required for an application development cloud, including object and block storage.

Airframe also comes bundled with Cloud Foundry, VMware's open source Platform-as-a-Service, for a turnkey application development cloud experience.

The widgetry comes packaged with a per-user entitlement key so users can upgrade to Piston Enterprise OpenStack without starting over.

Airframe can be used on an unlimited number of servers, for an unlimited time, with an unlimited number of users. The license excludes operation as a publicly available commercial service or for commercial resale.

It runs on commodity hardware.

It will be available next week to attendees of VMworld on a USB stick. General availability follows on September 4. There will be community forums for support.

Enterprise features such as live migration, automated hands-free scale-out, as well as Gridcentric's virtual memory streaming (VMS) memory over-subscription and rapid instance cloning are available only in Piston Enterprise OpenStack.

• VMware, Intel, and NEC All to Join OpenStack