_Nimbula Director is the industry’s first truly extensible cloud platform, the company says. Its functionality can be augmented by third parties who can provide network, data, Platform as a  Service (PaaS) or other cloud services.

Nimbula Director 2.0 is aimed at VMware customers. By supporting the VMware ESXi hypervisor, Director 2.0 delivers Amazon Elastic Compute (EC2)-style cloud services. Director 2.0 will also support VMware’s Cloud Foundry PaaS solution. The company also became a member of VMware’s Technology Alliance Program.

The new release introduces groundbreaking new functionality requested by Nimbula's growing customer base and advances Nimbula's technology vision.

"Nimbula Director 2.0 is an important milestone and huge leap forward for us and our customers," said Chris Pinkham, Co-Founder and CEO. "We continue to deliver the best-in-class operational experience with easy install and seamless management of the infrastructure and have added more unique capabilities to our growing list of innovative features."

More than ever, today’s businesses demand far greater operational agility, flexibility, and control just to maintain their existing competitive advantages. At a minimum, businesses today must have:

• Autonomy and control of their own compute needs, delivered without red tape accelerating the development of new initiatives to market.
• Cost transparency that ties capital investments to business outcomes.
• Flexibility that allows businesses to choose the right tool for the right task while adhering to necessary security, compliance, or regulatory requirements.
• No organization is an island any longer – collaboration must be easy to setup and tear down so business arrangements can be initiated, executed, modified, and returned without a massive effort from IT

Cloud is a technology or set of technologies that hold the promise to solve all these business computing dilemmas.

How It Works

Nimbula Director powerfully abstracts the underlying technology to present a coherent view of a completely automated on-premise compute and storage cloud. Providing a one-stop virtual data center management solution, Nimbula Director isolates customers from the operational and hardware complexity associated with deploying compute in the static private data center.
A RESTful HTTP API provides a uniform and comprehensive interface to all aspects of cloud resource control, including access to both on-premise and external private and public clouds. Cloud resources can also be managed via a command line interface (CLI) and web control panel, built on top of the API.

Beneath the virtual data center abstraction sits a physical layer of storage, network and compute hardware managed by multilayer control software. Nimbula Director integrates the Linux operating system and KVM hypervisor with node and network management software on each node to achieve automated deployment and configuration.

Nimbula is announcing enhancements in Nimbula 2.0 on five critical fronts:

1. Extensibility: Nimbula Director is the industry's first truly extensible cloud platform. Its functionality can be augmented by third parties who can provide network, data, PaaS or other cloud services. Those services and their custom logic are embedded into the cloud, are run and managed as if they were written by Nimbula and inherit all of Nimbula Director's high availability, multi-tenancy and network security functionality. Services are therefore easy to integrate, inherit a wide range of management functionality and are presented seamlessly to the tenants of the cloud.
2. VMware Support: Nimbula Director is the first Cloud OS to bring the benefits of an EC2-style cloud to VMware customers with its support of the ESXi hypervisor. In addition, Nimbula Director will support VMware's Cloud Foundry PaaS solution, and Nimbula is now a member of VMware's Technology Alliance Program (TAP).
3. Application Management: Nimbula Director is extending its management from the control plane up into the end user application space. Customers can now orchestrate the provisioning of complex applications and have the system monitor and manage applications over their lifetimes. As a result, customer applications become as reliable as the Nimbula control plane without any need to alter the application.
4. DNS and VPN services: This release rounds out the IaaS networking feature set, which also includes DHCP, NAT, firewall and VLAN services, providing a complete set of networking services required for running real world applications. Nimbula Director makes network configuration completely self-service, decreasing provisioning times and lowering the burden from the IT staff of enterprises and service providers alike.
5. Enterprise Readiness: Nimbula has furthered its enterprise readiness lead releasing the only production ready cloud infrastructure solution by, among other things, introducing a scalable distributed backend database, using an SELinux base for its node software, and introducing more enterprise systems management functionality and adding quota management as well.

"Nimbula Director impressed us with its security model, which was a key reason for choosing it for our cloud deployment," said Matt Regan, Program Manager at Solers, an information technology solutions provider for the United States government. "The software already had a truly unique advanced permissioning and firewall functionality, and it is great to see more security related advances in this new version."

"After evaluating several cloud platforms, we found that Nimbula Director was the only one that had the implementation excellence, ease of management, reliability and elasticity to help us with our public and private cloud projects," said Sofiane Ammar, Founder and CEO at VirtualScale, a system integrator focused on building public and private cloud projects. "Their implementation is second to none, and we are excited to see how they are growing their capabilities and adding new functionality."

Benefits

1. Increased business agility: Secure self-service enables end users to experiment with new ideas any time and bring concepts to delivery orders of magnitude faster than ever before.
2. Low cost cloud infrastructure: both capital and operational expenses are minimized through automation, the leveraging of commodity components, and the ability to manage multiple sites as a single resource pool.
3. Security: Centralized network and authorization policies ensure that the right people are using the right resources at all times.
4. Cost transparency: All cloud activity is logged, metered and assigned to users and accounts so that each tenant is aware of the costs incurred for their work.
5. Controlled use of public cloud: Where private cloud capacity is insufficient, Nimbula Director seamlessly manages bursting to the public cloud and adds the controls necessary for IT to enforce the required compliance and policy. Public cloud becomes just one more tool in the IT toolkit IT once again becomes a partner for the business.

Availability and Pricing Nimbula Director 2.0 is currently in beta and is expected to be generally available in March 2012.