Nimbula Keeps Cloud Computing Cash Coming With New Funding Round

Cloud operating system maker Nimbula on Monday said it has secured $15 million in its second round of venture capital funding, pushing its total funding to more than $20 million.

The latest round was fueled by financing from Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital. Along leading the second round of venture capital funding, Accel Partners' Ping Li has joined Nimbula's board of directors.

According to Nimbula, the new funding will be used to continue the company's investment in innovation around its hybrid cloud computing technologies and to drive market adoption of its product to manage on- and off-premises infrastructure.

Nimbula has been making waves since emerging from stealth mode in June. The company is the brainchild of two former Amazon executives, Chris Pinkham and Willem van Biljon, who were instrumental in the development of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) cloud infrastructure offering. With Nimbula, the pair looks to blend the scale, agility and efficiency available in public clouds, like EC2, with the security, customization and control in private cloud solutions.

Nimbula formed in early 2009 with $5.75 million in Series A funding from Sequoia Capital and VMware.

Nimbula plans to release its first product, Nimbula Director, a cloud computing operating system that manages both on-premise and off-premise cloud IT resources in a customer-controlled infrastructure, later this year. General availability is slated for the fourth quarter. Currently, Nimbula is in closed beta tests with a half-dozen companies.

The Nimbula Director cloud OS targets the enterprise with scalability, ease of use, flexibility, reliability and security, Pinkham has said. Nimbula Director lets users specify what application locations they want running where -- public or private -- and select attributes around it. Nimbula Director, Pinkham said, offers utility grade computing and innovation behind the firewall while allowing linear scaling to thousands of nodes and automated hand-off installation and data center management.

Nimbula is the most recent cloud computing startup to raise a substantial amount of cash. Earlier this year, private and hybrid cloud platform maker Eucalyptus Systems announced a $20 million round of funding and cloud application deployment company Makara announced $6 million in funding.