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Nimbula instamatic cloud kit set for launch

'Private' Amazon mimic free on 40 cores

Cloud Connect Nimbula – the build-your-own-cloud outfit founded by Amazon's former vice president of engineering – has announced that its flagship product, a "cloud operating system" known as Nimbula Director, will be officially launched within the next 30 days.

Nimbula VP of marketing Reza Malekzadeh told The Register that the company will also offer a free version of the product that can be used on 40 or fewer processing cores. Nimbula mimics Amazon's EC2 "public infrastructure cloud" inside your private data center, providing on-demand access to readily scalable computing resources, including processing power, storage, and networking. Speaking with The Reg last year, Nimbula CEO Chris Pinkham said that the platform is designed to completely automate the creation of so-called "private clouds".

"We want everything to be automated from the first time the infrastructure is turned on," Pinkham said. "We hope that this will be a significant contribution, change the way that traditional infrastructure is managed and thought of. We think of it as infrastructure-as-a-service out of the box."

Nimbula Director installs on bare-metal servers, and it's compatible with both the Xen and KVM hypervisors. The platform offers its own REST (representational state transfer) API – accessible from either the web or the command line – but it's designed to dovetail with Amazon EC2, mapping its own APIs to Amazon's so you can move applications between your private cloud and the EC2 public infrastructure. In the future, Nimbula plans to play nice with other public clouds as well.

Nimbula offers for-pay support services with the free version of Nimbula Director. If you use the product with more than 40 cores, you pay an annual subscription that includes maintenance and support services. The product is currently in beta. You can download the beta from the Nimbula website.

On Tuesday, the company also introduced several partners who have agreed to help with the adoption of Nimbula Director. These partners include Citrix, Opscode, and Scalr. Opscode –founded by another ex-Amazon employee – offers an open source framework known as Chef, a means of juggling server configurations atop infrastructure clouds. Scalr offers an open source cloud-management platform. Both are also available as web services. ®

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