Nimbula Director Cloud OS Prepares For Launch

Start-up cloud provider Nimbula has announced plans to launch its flagship private cloud product, Nimbula Director, during the next 30 days, promising easier management of cloud resources.

Currently in beta, Nimbula Director creates Amazon-like “public infrastructure clouds” within private data centres, providing on-demand access to scalable computing resources such as processing power, storage and networking.

“Nimbula is helping make the adoption of cloud a greater reality,” said Nimbula CEO Chris Pinkham. He also explained that the platform has been designed to completely automate  the creation of private clouds.

Amazon EC2-like service

Nimbula was founded by former Amazon executives Chris Pinkham (left) and Willem van Biljon, who spearheaded the development of Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud).

“Based on Nimbula’s cloud operating system technology, Nimbula Director delivers Amazon EC2-like services behind the firewall,” said the company in December.

Besides automated deployment and cloud management, the software can also scale as well as migrate existing applications into the cloud, and launch a multi-platform environment with flexible networking features.

According to the company, the software allows organisations to move applications between their private cloud and the EC2 public infrastructure. Nimbula could even interact with other public clouds in the future.

Unveiled in December last year, Nimbula Director installs on bare-metal servers and supports both the KVM and Xen hypervisors.

Speaking to The Register, Nimbula’s vice president of marketing Reza Malekzadeh said the company will offer a free version of the forthcoming product for deployments on infrastructure under 40 processing cores.

However, the software is alos available on an annual subscription basis, for deployments on infrastructure with more than 40 processing cores. This comes with both maintenance and support services.