Two former Amazon executives responsible for the development of Amazon’s EC2 cloud service, Chris Pinkham and Willem Van Biljon, launched Nimbula Cloud Operating System. Nimbula has been in covert development since 2009 after acquiring 5.75 million dollars in funding.
According to Roelof Botha, GP at Sequoia Capital, “Cloud computing is a game changing market opportunity and Nimbula is uniquely positioned to capitalize on it,”
What is Nimbula?
Simply defined, Nimbula like Amazon EC2 is an automated cloud management system that delivers services behind a firewall.
With Nimbula, you can extend or re-purpose your existing infrastructure and build a computing cloud in a trusted environment. By using a common API, you can access on and off premise cloud services.
How Does Nimbula Work?
As I understand it, Nimbula Director (cloud OS) allows you to manage both on-site and off-site cloud IT resources behind a firewall.(See Figure 1).
The Nimbula API provides an interface to manage your virtual data center. You have the ability to manage resources via a command line interface (CLI) as well as a web control panel built on top of the API (Figure 2 – 4).
Figure 2: Nimbula Login Page
Figure 3: Nimbula Web Console
Beneath the virtual data center sits a physical layer of storage (EMC, NETAPP), networking hardware ( Cisco, Juniper), compute hardware (DELL, HP, etc) all managed by a multilayer control software. Nimbula integrates a hypervisor with node management to achieve automated deployment and configuration.
Joubert Steyn, Managing Director of Information Technology, Metropolitan Health Group, “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,” said Steyn. “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.”
Figure 4: Nimbula Reporting
Nimbula Infrastructure
Nimbula runs on a single or multi-cluster site intermingled with 32 or 64 bit computers. The computers must meet the following software and hardware standards below:
| CPU | Intel® VT or AMD-V required, 64 bit recommended Nimbula may also run on 32 bit machines, but subject to the restriction that compute instances can not have more than 2GB of RAM. 2 or more cores recommended |
| RAM | 1GB minimum, at least 4GB recommended |
| Harddrive | 100GB required, 500GB-1.5TB recommended |
| NIC | 100Mbps, PXE support 1Gbps recommended Nimbula supports any network cards supported by Debian 5.0 |
| BIOS | PXE support CPU Virtualization enabled |
| CDROM | At least 1 machine needs to have a CD/DVD-ROM drive to facilitate the installation of the seed node that then propagates via the network. |
After reading through some use cases, I like what they have to offer. For example, let’s say you are a CGI Animation studio and your movie rendering farm has roughly 5000 CPU’s which is enough to handle your load on average but at peak use is insufficient. Now let’s add that your studio is owned by a larger studio that has a movie rendering farm also and has enough capacity to handle your movie rendering at peak times. Nimbula Director provides you with the ability to burst into the parent companies movie rendering at peak use keeping all your information inside the company by leveraging a internal enterprise cloud. You could take this a step further now and when total peak capacity is met (both companies), burst out to the Internet Cloud and spin up instances via Amazon EC2 to handle additional movie rendering loads.
For more information on what Nimbula has to offer, see nimbula.com.
Discussion
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