Nimbula readies cloud operating system

Nimbula says its cloud computing operating system, designed to turn underused datacentres into cloud providers, will be available by the end of April.

In an announcement at the Cloud Connect Conference in Silicon Valley on Tuesday, the company promised Nimbula Director "within the next 30 days", and said it would be free for installations running on 40 or fewer processing cores.

Nimbula says its cloud computing operating system will be available by the end of April. Photo credit: Nimbula

"We made our beta software publicly available last December and have since been working with a strong, dedicated community of enterprise and service provider beta testers," said Nimbula co-founder Willem van Biljon. "Their commitment and feedback has helped us prepare for our general availability in the best way possible."

Nimbula Director uses both KVM and Xen hypervisors and can be installed on bare-metal servers. It "abstracts the underlying technology to present a coherent view of a completely automated on-premise compute cloud", according to company documents.

Nimbula Director can also create and detach virtual storage pools, which can be chained to individual virtualised instances. Access to Nimbula Director services is via a web interface, command line or applications that plug into the operating system's API to interact with it and the underlying hardware.

Applications running on Nimbula Director can be farmed out to external private or public clouds, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), if needed, Nimbula said. Prior to founding the company, the team behind Nimbula worked on the development of AWS's Elastic Compute Cloud.