Nimbula Launches Purpose-Built Cloud OS

At this still-early stage of the cloud IT era, a software vendor coming up with a bulletproof operating system for running public, private or hybrid clouds could find itself in a golden position in the future.

Usual-suspect candidates at this point include hypervisor developers VMware, Citrix and Microsoft, as well as systems providers Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Dell, Oracle, Cisco Systems and EMC-which all want to be all things to everybody.

Then there are the smaller but quicker-moving-and often more progressive-players. Nimbula is one of those.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based software developer, which pulls no punches in calling itself the Cloud Operating System Company, came out April 6 with Nimbula Director, which it says brings a familiar “Amazon EC2-like experience” to enterprises and service providers.

Director, which is licensed free of charge for small systems (up to 40 cores), is a purpose-built OS that aggregates difficult-to-deal-with silos of on-premises and off-premises resources into a single dashboard, so that information across a diverse system can be shared, stored and analyzed, if need be.

For deployments on infrastructure with more than 40 cores, Nimbula Director is licensed on an annual subscription basis. This includes both maintenance and support services. For details on pricing, go here.

Nimbula, founded by the same team that developed Amazon EC2, was named one of the most promising startups in The Wall Street Journal and was described as “one of three cloud properties ready to burst” in Fortune magazine.

Nimbula Director is available for download here. Users will be able to purchase an optional annual support package for the free version of the product, the company said.