Nimbula has released a new version of its cloud operating system it claims is the first to support a geographically distributed cloud environment.
Nimbula Director 1.5 is designed to isolates customers from the operational and hardware complexity associated with deploying of private or public cloud instances by providing self-service access to resources and the ability to deploy to any site worldwide from one single login.
The cloud management firm said it had released the geographical functionality in response to user feedback and requests.
Willem van Biljon, Nimbula co-founder and vice president of products, said: "We're continuing to aggressively innovate so that our customers can build clouds for a wider range of uses and applications."
He added that, in addition to the single multi-site cloud view developments, this 1.5 release introduces other advances around to product to improve scalability, automation, and security.
The release enables policy-based automation for compute and storage for users to request resources of particular capabilities, while allowing cloud administrators to manage tiers of service, set asides for particular tenants and the set permissions to govern access accordingly.
It adds new storage management functionality that the company said extends the self-service end user experience of Amazon's Elastic Block Storage (EBS) to the management of storage environments from other cloud vendors with quality-of-service functionality.
Nimbula Director also now allows cloud administrator to bundle up a choice of OSs, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, along with the drivers and management software to create a customised package for their own cloud.
The company claims a "zero-touch install" can automate deployment of these customised packages so that users can grow a Nimbula-powered more quickly.
The release addresses a number of emerging cloud integration management headaches that analysts have suggested are holding back the growth of cloud services.
A survey carried out last month by TheInfoPro, a division of analyst firm The 451 Group, found three quarters of enterprises had virtualised their cloud servers. But it also revealed that few had currently implemented the core management, automation and orchestration functionality, required for flexible, agile and cost effective internal cloud solutions.
