Nimbula release builds out cloud ecosystem

Cloud operating system (OS) company Nimbula has announced the immediate availability of Nimbula Director 1.5, an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform for managing compute and storage resources.

The company has also announced new vendor partnerships with Atalanta Systems, Electric Cloud Standing Cloud, Gluster and Scality, aimed at building out a complete cloud stack ecosystem.

While the Director 1.5 release itself is designed to support geographically distributed cloud environments for enterprises and service providers to build private, public and hybrid cloud infrastructures, the new partners are hoped to broaden the appeal of the OS to new customers.

“Nimbula is continuing its commitment in building a rich, diverse partner base to serve the new use cases and solutions enabled by cloud computing," said Reza Malekzadeh, marketing vice president at Nimbula.

He said they would complete an end-to-end offering by supporting platform-as-as-service (PaaS) and integrated software development and IT operational (DevOps) use cases, “for agile application development and by supporting additional storage solutions”.

Nimbula and Atalanta Systems have teamed up to integrate Opscode Chef and its tools with Nimbula Director so customers can use the Opscode systems integration framework to orchestrate and manage workloads hosted on Nimbula cloud infrastructure.

The partnership with Electric Cloud integrates its ElectricCommander build, test and deployment management and execution system to automates these processes and provisions within Nimbula cloud environments.

Designed to service engineering teams that use cloud infrastructures for software development, testing and deployment, Mike Maciag, Electric Cloud chief executive said its integration with Nimbula could automate the management lifecycle of cloud resources. This, he added, would help to “achieve greater development agility, create higher quality software and speed and time-to-market”.

Standing Cloud is supporting PaaS based on Nimbula's cloud infrastructure software to the quicker and more cost-effective development, deployment, management and customisation of applications by end users and developers. More than 100 open source and commercial applications written in PHP, Java, Ruby on Rails and Python are available on Standing Cloud's PaaS.

“Now, service providers can offer PaaS along with their public IaaS, without additional effort,” said David J. Jilk, Standing Cloud chief executive. A Nimbula-based cloud will be immediately differentiated from infrastructure-only offerings. For the service provider's customers, Standing Cloud's PaaS lets them set up applications in minutes and provides an easy interface for developing and managing those applications.”

Nimbula also announced partnerships with storage providers Gluster and Scality to expand Nimbula Director’s support for network-attached (NAS) and persistent storage respectively.

Support for Scality’s RING Organic Storage provides access for virtual machines to Scality's object storage located either in a local or remote cluster.