Nimbula said its Migration Service is designed for those companies that start out in a public cloud infrastructure , such as Amazon 's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2 ), because they want to avoid initial capital investment or they need to address rapid growth, or both. After the initial growth phase, and once they have a handle on the workload required, an internal cloud is often planned in order to control expenses and to complement the public workload.

'A Seamless Migration'

Nimbula Director of Professional Services Nishan Sathyanarayan said in a statement that customers often look to a hybrid deployment model, with both their own private cloud as well as public infrastructure. Through the technical design and migration plan offered by Nimbula, he said, "our customers can confidently execute a seamless migration into a robust and cost-effective private or hybrid cloud solution and balance their investment in public clouds."

Nimbula's key strategic focus is for enterprises to use public clouds when fast growth of applications is required. Once the workload and needs have become stable, Nimbula sees it making more sense to migrate to an internal cloud. If the app still has unpredictable bursts of activity, appropriately called cloudbursts, that component might be left in the public cloud.

The Nimbula service provides consultants to help customers design and build a commodity cloud in-house, without the normal investment required, by using existing resources wherever possible. Typically, this would incorporate x86 servers and Nimbula's cloud system software , and the customer does the actual implementation.

One of those offerings is the Nimbula Director Jumpstart package. The Jumpstart package includes deployment of a customized showcase or proof-of-concept environment for demonstration purposes, to build internal company support.

'Cloud Operating System'

The Director product is one entry in a new category known as a "cloud operating system," and it provides a view of an automated compute and storage cloud, so that the operational and hardware complexity is separated from the virtual data center management solution. A cloud operating system treats all resources, in private or in public clouds, as one system that is optimized for required workloads.

The company said that Director is used by both enterprises and service providers. Key uses by enterprises include deploying a private cloud for application development and testing, hosting of such apps as Web 2.0 or e-commerce, or controlling use of public clouds through federation functionality in Director. Service providers use Director for implementing their own public clouds.

Nimbula's founders helped build Amazon EC2. Chris Pinkham, now Nimbula CEO, was vice president of engineering at Amazon Web services, and Willem van Biljon, now Nimbula vice president of products, was involved with the business plan for EC2.