Earlier this week, Nimbula, a cloud operating system company, announced that it had joined the OpenStack community. OpenStack has been in the news quite a bit lately, perhaps most notably this month because of the addition of VMware to its OpenStack Foundation membership. We can only imagine why VMware has decided to join the OpenStack community at this time. So why then has Nimbula joined this week? What is it about OpenStack that helped them make this decision? To find out more, I was able to speak with the company's vice president of marketing and sales, Reza Malekzadeh.
VMblog: Let's start off the conversation by me asking about your decision to join the OpenStack
community.
Reza Malekzadeh: We recognized that joining the OpenStack community presented
a great opportunity for us. OpenStack is praised for its role in the industry,
and we believe we can significantly impact the project through our product
expertise and extensive experience. Combining our features and products and
being an OpenStack member provides our customers with the best of both worlds.
While our flagship product, Nimbula Director, is not open source, the
contributions we will provide are open source and will be governed by the
OpenStack apache license. Many cloud platform providers are taking advantage of
OpenStack by joining the community to boost their reputations, but they are not
giving back to the project. We realize the pay-off associated with contributing
to OpenStack and we are thrilled that this is now a reality.
VMblog: You mentioned that you will be making significant
contributions to the OpenStack community. Can you give us a few
examples of that?
Malekzadeh: Bringing our product expertise and extensive experience to
the OpenStack project is an important next step for us as a company. First and
foremost, we will offer real intellectual property to OpenStack that will help
the project mature, allowing for an increased number of deployments. As we
develop Nimbula Director, we will offer OpenStack services to our customers. By
assisting in the improvement of OpenStack’s codebase, and providing the
aforementioned contributions, we will help the project continue to take
significant steps.
VMblog: Talk to us about the benefits end-users will
see.
Malekzadeh: Now that we are OpenStack members, we will be able to offer
our customers a range of extended infrastructure and platform services that are
in line with an industry-standard effort. Our extensive customer base will
experience the benefits of joining OpenStack, as we will be able to deliver a
fully functional, automated cloud infrastructure constructed around a standard
platform.
VMblog: What are the main benefits of your flagship product,
Nimbula Director?
Malekzadeh: Our goal is to ensure that
customers are able to rely on Nimbula Director for the majority of their needs
and feel confident in doing so. We look at the cloud platform as a one-stop
shop: delivering a high level of self-service, automation, and application
orchestration features. Timing and simplicity make Nimbula Director that much
more attractive for enterprises looking to make the move to the cloud. Within
hours, enterprises and service providers are able to build fully functional,
large-scale infrastructure services from bare metal. The ease of use stems from
the fact that Nimbula Director isolates customers from the operational and
hardware complexities that are common when deploying to a private, hybrid or
public cloud.
VMblog: So what can we expect to see next from Nimbula?
Malekzadeh: With the addition of OpenStack, we have made another
significant advancement as we develop Nimbula Director and what it has to offer.
Under the reigns of Chris Pinkham, co-founder and CEO, and Willem van Biljon,
co-founder and vice president of products, we will continue to provide
enterprises with cloud platform that ensures peak-performance, and that business
requirements are met.
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Thanks again to Reza Malekzadeh, Vice President of Marketing & Sales at Nimbula, for taking time out to speak with VMblog.