The new release introduces new functionality requested by the company's growing customer base and advances its technology vision.

Nimbula, the Cloud Operating System Company, yesterday announced the launch of Nimbula Director 2.0 which enhances its public, private and hybrid cloud capabilities for enterprises, SaaS companies, governments and service providers. The new release introduces new functionality requested by the company's growing customer base and advances its technology vision.

According to the company, it is announcing enhancements in Nimbula 2.0 on five critical fronts:

• Extensibility: Nimbula Director is an 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.
• 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 the company is now a member of VMware's Technology Alliance Program (TAP).
• 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.
• 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.
• Enterprise Readiness: The company has released a production ready cloud infrastructure solution by 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.
  

It avers that Nimbula Director 2.0 is currently in beta and is expected to be generally available in March 2012. The new release is a free update for existing users. For deployments on infrastructure up to and including 40 cores, Nimbula Director is licensed free of charge. A paid support option is available for users of the free version. For deployments on infrastructure more than 40 cores, Nimbula Director is licensed on an annual subscription basis and includes both maintenance and support services.

"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."

"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."