New private cloud launched by Amazon EC2 developer

Friday, July 02, 2010

Recently, the developer of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud - considered one of the better public cloud offerings - has announced the creation of a similar, but private, offering, according to Network World.

Chris Pinkham, who helmed Amazon's EC2 development during his five years at the company, has founded a new company, called Nimbula, that has $5.8 milllion in funding and has VMware CEO Diane Green on board as well. The new company's first offering, Nimbula Director, is a truly private cloud, which "automatically discovers servers, lays down the virtualization technology and control pane software" and "automatically organizes nodes into an EC2-style cloud," for private networks, the report states.

"The build process is ongoing. As new nodes are introduced or retired, those resources are automatically discovered," said Pinkham, Network World relays.

Currently, Nimbula Director, which is in the beta testing stage, integrates with Xen and KVM, but Pinkham is working on adding VMware deployments to the offering, as he calls his technology "fundamentally agnostic."

The report states any businesses using Pinkham's technology can offer virtual machine instances of "any flavor they like, from Linux to Windows, while setting policies that determine how much compute and storage capacity VMs can consume."

Nimbula Director fits in with recent industry reports concerning cloud computing. A recent survey from global market intelligence firm IDC found 55 percent of respondents prefer private clouds over public ones.