At the Gartner Data Center Conference, Nimbula, a cloud operating
system company, today announced the availability of the public beta of
its Nimbula Director product, which delivers Amazon EC2-like services
behind the firewall. The software is now available for free download
via the company’s Website, according to a company release. Director is
designed to transform inefficient and under-utilized private data
centers into more configurable compute capacity while supporting
controlled access to off-premise clouds.
Director provides utility-grade cloud features such as policy based
authorization, enabling secure multitenancy, topology-independent
distributed network security and monitoring and metering. Director also
provides highly automated deployment and cloud management to scale and
facilitates migration of existing applications into the cloud by
supporting multiplatform environments and flexible networking and
storage.
"Midsize and large organizations have a growing interest in cloud
computing as they see how private cloud computing can help them gain
more control over their infrastructure," said Tom Bittman, vice
president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "This interest is
turning into real activity and near-term spending on private cloud
solutions."
Jim Harding, chief technology officer at Sabey, who has
built and operates data centers, said they have been working with the
Nimbula team over the past few months as they marched toward the
availability of the public beta of Nimbula Director. “Director is
delivering on the team's vision and will help us reach new levels of
agility with our infrastructure,” he said. “As an IT team, we will be
able to focus on services delivery and innovation."
Dave Bartoletti, senior analyst at IT research firm Taneja Group, noted
more and more frequently, they hear from companies eager to realize the
proven benefits of the public cloud infrastructure in their own data
centers, and to do so, they need a fundamentally new approach to how
they manage their private infrastructure.
"As data centers continue to scale, virtualization alone is no longer
enough to deliver higher levels of automation, efficiency and agility
-- what's needed is the right cloud operating system,” he said.
“Nimbula Director has an innovative architecture which delivers higher
service-levels from existing infrastructures and also provides a solid
platform on which to develop new cloud-based services to extract even
more value from IT investments, both on- and off-premises."
Cloud Computing 
