Self provisioning, multi-tenant accounting and extensibility available for private and public cloud
February 13, 2012
Nimbula chose the Cloud Connect conference in Santa Clara to unveil its Director 2.0 which provides Amazon EC2-like functionality for organizations looking to operate a scalable private cloud, Software as a Service (SaaS) or public cloud service.
Many organizations want the elasticity and user provisioning capabilities exemplified by Amazon’s Web Services, but the investment to develop the software to operate the cloud service has been daunting. This was the opportunity that the Nimbula team, whose founders were directly involved in the development of Amazon Web Services, decided to exploit.
The Director 2.0 release includes planned roadmap functionality as well as new features driven by customer request. Primary to the roadmap functionality is the ability for third parties to extend and tailor the product for specific organization requirements. This provides third party service additions to contain all of the multi-tenancy and security features of the Nimbula framework. A tight integration with VMware has also been key to the development of the 2.0 release. VMware customers have the support of the ESXi hypervisor and VMware’s Cloud Foundry Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution which enhances the development and test environment. Applications management is another important feature which provides monitoring and alerts for applications running in the elastic compute layer without modification to the applications.
Customer driven enhancements include DNS and VPN capabilities, so networks can be easily configured. Nimbula calls other features enterprise readiness, including a SELinux base for its node software, external code security audit and quota management.
Currently in Beta test, general availability is expected in March when free downloads will be available for users of up to 40 cores, including the open KVM hypervisor, with a paid support option. For deployments on more than 40 cores, Nimbula Director is licensed on an annual subscription basis and includes both maintenance and support services.
Our Take: Nimbula represents a unique offering for companies that want to prove a concept for elastic private cloud, SaaS and public cloud services. The ability to test applications under the KVM hypervisor without investment in VMware certainly will attract a number of organizations. Reference architectures have been defined for both Cisco UCS and SuperMicro, the latter should draw a number of companies in research and high performance computing. This is a distinctly different space than cloud storage gateways clouds because of its focus on the elastic compute side of the formula, although the platform can be used to develop hybrid clouds and even deploy storage controller VMs within the architecture. It will be interesting to see if this space develops beyond offerings from VMware. –James E. Bagley
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