Piston Cloud, a startup that offers a commercial distribution of the OpenStack cloud OS, announced an OEM agreement with GridCentric to integrate its VMS technology with Piston Enterprise.

Gridcentric’s Virtual Memory Streaming software is a virtualization solution developed for VDI that, among other things, offers a memory reduction of up to 50 percent. That means the number of virtual desktops in a deployment can be doubled, and now it ships with every single Piston Enterprise license. GridCentric also claims that VMS is geared to handle so called ‘boot storms’ –when a large number of concurrent users all log in at the same time and strain the system.

“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. This is the first truly affordable, easily-managed OpenStack VDI solution available.”

There is no shortage of competition in the VDI space, but right now Piston Enterprise is in fact the only major desktop virtualization platform that’s based on OpenStack. And the open-source cloud operating system is gaining traction at a very rapid pace; plenty to justify Piston’s head-start.

While the company is expanding its core business, it hasn’t forgotten its roots just yet, and is still very much involved in the open community. Earlier this year we learned of a partnership between Piston and VMware to integrate OpenStack and Cloud Foundry – the latter’s free PaaS that is also becoming rather popular in its respective market. The joint initiative is founded on BOSH, a deployment tool for implementations of VMware’s project.