Cloud OS Nimbula Director 2.0 Announced

Nimbula, a Mountain View, California-based provider of comprehensive cloud operating system (OS), has announced the release of latest version of its Cloud OS, Nimbula Director 2.0, which brings Amazon EC2-like functionality to VMware users by supporting the ESXi hypervisor, VMware's Cloud Foundry PaaS solution.

According to Nimbula, the latest version of Nimbula Director dramatically enhances its public, private and hybrid cloud capabilities for enterprises, SaaS (News - Alert) companies, governments and service providers by incorporating groundbreaking new functionality requested by Nimbula's growing customer base.

With the help of Nimbula Director 2.0 Cloud OS, services are easy to integrate and users can inherit a wide range of management functionality. Because, Nimbula Director is the industry's first truly extensible cloud platform and its functionality can be augmented by third parties who can provide network, data, PaaS or other cloud services.

Officials with Nimbula said in a press release that the services and their custom logic are embedded into the cloud, are run and managed as if they were written by Nimbula and inherit all of Nimbula Director's high availability, multi-tenancy and network security functionality.

As a member of VMware's Technology Alliance Program (TAP), Nimbula Director 2.0 also supports VMware's Cloud Foundry PaaS solution.

In addition, the latest release of Nimbula Director extends management from the control plane up into the end user application space. With this, users can orchestrate the provisioning of complex applications and have the system monitor and manage applications over their lifetimes. Consequently, customer applications become reliable without any need to alter the application.

The Nimbula Director 2.0 makes network configuration completely self-service, decreasing provisioning times and lowering the burden from the IT staff of enterprises and service providers alike.

“Nimbula Director impressed us with its security model, which was a key reason for choosing it for our cloud deployment,” said Matt Regan, program manager at Solers, an information technology solutions provider for the United States government, in a statement. “The software already had a truly unique advanced permissioning and firewall functionality, and it is great to see more security related advances in this new version.”

Currently available in beta, the Nimbula Director 2.0 is expected to be generally available in March 2012. It also features enhanced enterprise readiness lead releasing the only production ready cloud infrastructure solution by introducing a scalable distributed backend database, using a SELinux base for its node software.

In addition, the Nimbula Director 2.0 rounds out the IaaS networking feature set, which also includes DHCP, NAT, firewall and VLAN services. This provides a complete set of networking services required for running real world applications.

 “After evaluating several cloud platforms, we found that Nimbula Director was the only one that had the implementation excellence, ease of management, reliability and elasticity to help us with our public and private cloud projects,” said Sofiane Ammar, founder and CEO at VirtualScale, a system integrator focused on building public and private cloud projects, in a statement. “Their implementation is second to none, and we are excited to see how they are growing their capabilities and adding new functionality.”

Recently, Nimbula had launched Cloud Migration Service, which is a professional service designed for customers looking to migrate from the public cloud to private or hybrid clouds.