Image via CrunchBase
Nimbula (previous CloudAve coverage), the company that helps enterprises build Amazon EC2 like cloud inside their data centers, today announced the release of Nimbula Director 1.5. Nimbula Director is their flagship product that completely abstracts away all the complexity of the underlying infrastructure and offers a way to scale the cloud to thousands of nodes running tens of thousands of virtual instances without any performance hit. Unlike many other cloud platforms, Nimbula’s platform only support modern greenfield applications that are built for cloud. Working with the commodity servers, storage and network, Nimbula offers the highest levels of automation while also offering increased security. Nimbula’s one stop virtual data center management solution integrates with Linux operating system and KVM hypervisor with node and network management software on each node to achieve automated deployment and configuration.
Some of the features of this new version include:
- Support for geographically distributed cloud. Nimbula Director can now manage clouds in different geographical location in a single view. On the user experience front, this translates to users having single login to access resources from anywhere in the world
- With their policy based automation feature, it is possible for end users to request resources based on their exact needs. On the admin side, they not only can manage tiers of service but also have fine grained access control
- On the storage front, it is possible to get “EBS on Steroids” kind of storage from many different providers
- Nimbula Director now allows cloud administrator to package up a choice of operating systems, such as RHEL6, along with drivers and management software to create a customized basis for their own cloud
This new version is available next month as a free update for existing users. Nimbula uses a Freemium model with the platform being free for 40 cores and an annual subscription beyond that. Even the free users can get paid support.
Nimbula is an interesting player in the space because they have completely bet their future on greenfield application on cloud rather than bending backwards to support legacy applications. Even though I like their aggressive posturing and feel that it will be good for the cloud computing space in the long run, I am still not sure how they can crack open the enterprise marketplace. It will be interesting to see how they shape up against the “legacy supporting” competition in this space.
