Nimbula Cloud Computing

Nimbula [IaaS] Cloud Operating System

Nimbula Director is appealing because it promises to enable organizations to use existing infrastructure to rapidly build a highly scalable and flexible cloud in the trusted environment of their own data centers. As we explore ways to implement cloud computing, we've evaluated several private cloud solutions and Nimbula is the best one we've tried. The underlying technology is solid and it performs well. In addition, we've received great support from the Nimbula team. Our engineers really like the technology and the company.
— Beta Customer Joubert Steyn, Managing Director of Information Technology, Metropolitan Health Group

Nimbula, Inc, the Cloud Operating System Company, was founded in October 2009 in the State of CA by the team that developed the industry-leading Amazon EC2 public cloud service.

Nimbula delivers a new class of cloud infrastructure and services system that uniquely combines the flexibility, scalability and operational efficiencies of the public cloud with the control, security and trust of most advanced data centers.

Main Product - Nimbula Director is based on Nimbula's Cloud Operating System technology and delivers Amazon EC2-like services behind the firewall. Allowing customers to efficiently manage both on- and off-premises resources, Nimbula Director quickly and cost effectively transforms under-utilized private data centers into muscular, easily configurable compute capacity while supporting controlled access to off-premise clouds.

Nimbula Director released into beta on Dec. 6, 2010. A formal product launch is planned for spring 2011.

Target market
Nimbula Director is an infrastructure product and targets customers with specific workload requirements instead of particular industry verticals. Nimbula Director tends to be favoured by organizations wanting an Amazon EC2-like environment within their own datacenter to optimize their infrastructure utilization in the face of bursty workloads or to consolidate infrastructure usage for workloads that would historically have been run in separate datacenters. These customers are often divisions of larger organizations, rather than SMBs, looking for increased agility and fine-grained control and security for their R&D-oriented workloads which tend to fluctuate over time.

Nimbula Director provides powerful utility-grade cloud features like policy based authorization, enabling secure multi-tenancy, topology-independent distributed network security and dynamic storage provisioning and monitoring and metering. Nimbula Director also uniquely provides highly automated deployment and cloud management to scale and facilitates easy migration of existing applications into the cloud by .supporting multi-platform environments and flexible networking and storage.

Nimbula Cloud Operating System
The Nimbula Cloud Operating System is an automated cloud management system delivering Amazon EC2-like services behind the firewall. Nimbula's technology allows customers to easily repurpose their existing infrastructure and build a computing cloud in the trusted environment of their own data center. Using simple and rapid deployment technologies, The Nimbula Cloud OS transforms under-utilized private data centers into muscular, easily configurable compute capacity, quickly and cost effectively. With access to both on- and off-premise cloud services available via a common API, the Nimbula Cloud OS combines the benefits of capitalizing on internal resource capacity and controlled access to additional external compute capacity.

Nimbula Director Differentiation
Automated deployment and infrastructure management - highly automated deployment process allows low touch installation of large numbers of machines. Installation is very simple with an initial boot from a Live CD involving minimal configuration.

Scalability - From deployment to infrastructure management, it has been designed to operate at large scale, up to hundreds of thousands of nodes. New racks can be plugged into the network with minimal configuration and will be automatically installed and added to the pool of cloud resources within 15 minutes. Decentralized architecture ensures consistent performance.

Reliability - self-healing and self-organizing architecture employs sophisticated failover mechanisms that constantly monitor the health of services throughout the cluster.

Security and control - It supports user- and group-based authorization and the fine-grained permissions management based on policy allows multiple customers, groups and users to co-exist in isolation from each other or share resources on a single site.

Easy application migration - supports a wide range of platforms and provides flexible networking and storage, facilitating easy migration of existing applications. Facilitates the creation of highly dynamic virtual network topologies, independent of the underlying physical network topology. It also allows users to create virtual storage volumes that utilize your existing open source or commercial NAS or SAN deployments.

Multi-tenancy – allows multiple customers, groups and users to co-exist in isolation from each other or share resources on a single site.
Integration with existing user services - supports Active Directory/LDAP, facilitating hassle free user management and the efficient reuse of existing corporate user databases.

Advanced networking - supports standard IP allocation and allows customers to create and declare their own virtual Ethernets.

All Xen or KVM compatible operating systems supported - KVM and Xen hypervisor technologies provide support for compute instances running a wide variety of operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Linux, Solaris, BSD and AIX. Existing applications running on a wide range of operating systems can easily be moved to the cloud as Nimbula supports a host of guest operating systems.

Nimbula Director is based on REST Web APIs that abstract the servers, hypervisors, storage, and networks used to host applications. It has a Web control panel as well as a command line interface that accesses these APIs to control the underlying infrastructure.

Co-Founder and CEO - Chris Pinkham - Most recently initiated and managed the development of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Prior to that, he was Vice President of Engineering at Amazon.com, responsible for global IT infrastructure.

Board of directors includes Diane Greene, who was the Founder, President and CEO of VMware.

Beta customers include one large International Financial Institution, CGI Animation Studios (CA Studios), a Cloud ISP and Public Cloud Service Provider, an Independent Software Vendor, a Large National Healthcare Provider.

Investors: Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners (Round A - $5.75M, round B - $15M in August 2010).