Nimbula announced Nimbula Director V1.5 and with it the claim that they were offering "the First Cloud Operating System Able to Run Geographically Distributed Clouds." The company goes on to claim that Cloud Director V1.5 "helps enterprises and service providers build powerful private, hybrid and public cloud infrastructure. In my view, broad claims require broad proof.
What is an operating system?
An operating system can be thought of as a master control program that manages machine resources, such as processor time, internal memory allocation, storage devices and file systems, network I/O, making it possible for applications we know and love to work.
Operating systems have been designed for many tasks ranging from controlling the operations of machine tools, fuel injection systems, braking systems, smart phones, internet tablets, desktop and laptop computers, and, oh yes, servers.
The operating systems designed for commercial use are typically packaged with other software, known as system software, that allows users to login and use the system, manage files, connect to other systems over a network, and many other low level functions.
The operating system provides a large number of libraries containing code that allows applications to be developed. Other software, such as database engines, application frameworks and the like run on top of the operating system, system software and libraries.
Operating systems such as Windows, UNIX, Linux and Mac OS have become platforms for a very large portfolio of applications, development tools, utility software (such as sorting software), file systems, management software, virtualization technology and the like.
System suppliers, such as Dell, HP, IBM and others, typically do a great deal of operating system testing and tuning before releasing a new computer. These companies want to make sure that the value added features they've designed into their systems, such as advanced memory error correction circuitry, advanced power supplies, multi-processor support, or other key features work in the most optimal way.
How does Nimbula compare?
It appears that Nimbula has developed low level system software that can manage the low level operations of X86-based systems. It appears to be a Linux distribution that supports the KVM hypervisor. The company is offering libraries and system software to support distributed operations and Amazon EC2-like computing functions.
Snapshot analysis
Although most IT staff members don't give it much thought, operating
systems are critical pieces of software. They are very, very complex and
often require very specific environments. The suppliers of this
software typically maintain large labs and test the software on many
combinations of hardware and running many different applications. If
they haven't tested a specific configuration of hardware and software,
it is unlikely that they will support that configuration.
I have many questions about Nimbula Director. Here is a partial list of questions in no particular order that a customer should get answered before adopting this software.
- Which system suppliers have tested this software and will offer support when Nimbula Director is managing their systems?
- Which system features of what systems from what vendors will be
supported by this software? Companies pay a premium for these advanced
features and would be unhappy if these features were either ignored or
used badly by Nimbula Director.
- Which operating system suppliers will offer support of their
operating system when run in a virtual machine supported by Nimbula
Director? Customers might be unhappy if they're told "please reproduce
these problems on a physical machine before submitting problem reports."
- Which database management systems will be supported under what
operating systems running in one of Nimbula's virtual machines? As with
operating system problems, customers are likely to be upset if their
database supplier appears less than helpful because they've never had a
chance to test their software working under Nimbula's Director.
- Which development tools will be supported in this environment?
- Which storage suppliers will support their storage servers in this environment?
- While Nimbula often presents that the founders where involved in
the development of Amazon's EC2, no claim is made that it is compatible
with Amazon's software. Will it be wise for an organization to
re-architect their applications and workflows to work with Nimbula Director and, thus, be locked into Nimbula's environment.
Nimbula is a relative newcomer to the market and may have not yet had the time to work out answers to all of these questions.