Maureen O'Gara

At the OpenStack Design Summit & Conference this week in California, Nimbula, the cloud operating system company, signed up to be part of the OpenStack community to improve the OpenStack code base.

It will also incorporate OpenStack services in future Nimbula Director releases.

Nimbula Director, its flagship product, lets enterprises and service providers build large-scale, fully functional infrastructure services from bare metal in a matter of hours.

Its customers include the Russian Internet company Yandex and the US government service provider, Solers. (That drip you hear is evidently the Cold War melting.)

The widgetry is supposed to be differentiated by its high level of self-service, automation, application orchestration features and ease of use. It's cast as a one-stop virtual data center management solution that isolates customers from the operational and hardware complexities of deploying a private, hybrid or public cloud.

The company has very fancy cloud credentials. It was started by the team that built Amazon EC2 and means to continue to innovate in data center automation, software-defined networking and policy-based application orchestration. At least some of the widgetry will be contributed back to the OpenStack project to make it the platform of choice.

Nimbula VP of marketing and sales Reza Malekzadeh said in a statement that "Our customers appreciate the advanced functionality, scale and security model we provide, but have been asking us about a standardized core. We are excited to now be in a position to work with the OpenStack community to deliver a range of extended infrastructure and platform services around an industry-standard effort."

Nimbula is supposed to have a "comprehensive cloud operating system that uniquely combines the scalability and operational efficiencies of the public cloud with the control, security and trust of today's most advanced data centers."

It lists for $300 a core. Its closest competitor is probably Piston.