Amazon EC2-Like Private Clouds From Nimbula Director
Nimbula Director was one of several private cloud announcements at Gartner’s Data Centre Conference
Private cloud news has been rolling out of the Gartner Data Centre Conference in Las Vegas this week. Start-up Nimbula launched a beta version of its tool to automatically create private clouds and Unisys and Rackspace announced the Cloud Connect service that bridges private environment with the companies’ public cloud hosting services.
Private clouds promise control over the infrastructure as well as flexibility and scalability. Enterprises want to have the “proven benefits” of public clouds within their own data centres, said Dave Bartoletti, senior analyst at Taneja Group. Virtualisation is no longer enough to deliver higher levels of automation, efficiency, and agility, he said.
Automated Deployment And Management
Nimbula’s public beta of its Director package allows organisations to create Amazon-like “public infrastructure clouds” within their own private data centres to provide on-demand access to scalable computing resources including processing power, storage, and networking, according to the company.
“Based on Nimbula’s Cloud Operating System technology, Nimbula Director delivers Amazon EC2-like services behind the firewall,” the company said in a statement.
Along with automated deployment and cloud management, Director can also scale and migrate existing applications into the cloud, according to Nimbula. The software can launch a multi-platform environment with flexible networking features, such as load balancing, and storage, according to the company. Director supports both the KVM and Xen hypervisors.
Using the package, organisations can deploy hybrid clouds that span both public and private clouds. The software lets IT administrators move applications between the data centre and Amazon EC2. There will be similar integration with other public clouds, according to Nimbula. Nimbula Director may be deployed on-premise or as part of a hosted service.
The Nimbula Director software has a “launch plan” screen where IT organisations create and define a suite of heterogeneous virtual machines by listing each machine’s configuration. The software also gathers and collates monitoring information for the entire site and the displays the status overview as graphs.
The policy-based authorisation system ensures users are granted the correct level of access to system objects and resources. In the Nimbula Director software, administrators use a detailed chart with checkboxes to grant permissions on a granular level.
There are other platforms for private cloud deployments from vendors such as Microsoft, IBM, and open-source Eucalyptus. OpenStack, an open-source joint collaboration between Rackspace and NASA, is designed to be very scalable and to be built from ground up, which can take some time and effort.
Nimbula’s goal is to automate the entire private cloud deployment process. Nimbula’s focus is on automation, to simplify how organisations can deploy private clouds. IT organisations install the software on bare-metal servers. Then Director takes care of pooling, provisioning and managing the resources.
Nimbula has a number of big names backing it, including Amazon EC2 pioneers Chris Pinkham and Williem van Biljon. The founder and former CEO of VMware Diane Green is on Nimbula’s board of directors. The start-up has a number of VMware and Amazon executives, as well.
The beta software is currently available as a free download on Nimbula’s Web site. General availability is planned for the first half of 2011.
