Amazon experts launch private-cloud start-up

Two men who led one element of Amazon's successful cloud-computing services have launched their own a start-up called Nimbula focusing on a private version of the technology. Cloud computing takes several forms, but Amazon Web Services generally delivers building blocks available over the Internet that developers can use to construct their own higher-level services. Nimbula, in contrast, focuses more on a "private cloud" approach geared for companies building their own computing services based on a similar but in-house approach.

Nimbula CEO Chris Pinkham(Credit: Nimbula)

The start-up came out of stealth mode Wednesday, announcing its Nimbula Director product for managing private cloud infrastructure. It's not all about private clouds though: One thing Director can control is when to draw on public cloud services as well when peak computing loads demand. Nimbula's co-founders, Chief Executive Chris Pinkham and Vice President of Products Willem van Biljon, both worked on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud; Pinkham led the group that developed it, and van Biljon led its product development. The pair attracted $5.75 million in first-round funding from Sequoia Capital and VMware, an EMC subsidiary specializing in virtualization. Six international customers are beta-testing Nimbula, and the start-up plans to launch its product in the second half of the year. Nimbula was founded in early 2009, the company said. Cloud computing is all the rage, with infrastructure-level services such as those from Amazon and Rackspace, programmable services such as Google's App Engine, and more finished products such as Google Docs and Zoho's online productivity tools.

Nimbula VP Willem van Biljon(Credit: Nimbula)

One major obstacle for the philosophy is the reluctance of corporate computing administrators to yield control over their own equipment, though. Private cloud, while lacking the scale of public clouds, can be an answer for those who like cloud-computing philosophies of large-scale, shared resources but don't want to take the full plunge. But cloud computing companies face competition from those who already have a big business in computing infrastructure: those who sell operating systems for a living. Microsoft's Azure project makes Windows Server into a cloud computing service. And Linux leader Red Hat on Wednesday announced Red Hat Cloud Foundations, an "easy on-ramp to cloud computing" intended to let customers more easily build their own cloud-computing designs. The first such foundation is focused on private clouds.
Source: CNET News (http://cnet.com/)