Nimbo – Cloud Enablement Platform
Nimbo is HCL's cloud enablement and orchestration platform that incorporates core modules like capacity planning, load balancing, network & resource management, and disaster recovery. This helps in governing enablement in an automated fashion and meeting critical cloud computing delivery parameters: SLA, high availability, elasticity, security and self-service.
Nimbo uses a combination of its own unique solutions & virtualization technologies to deliver services compliant to these parameters almost hands-free. Nimbo exports itself via a self-service portal which businesses can customize for specific needs and deliver any IT component (software, platform, or Infrastructure) as a service.
The key features of Nimbo that would be utilized for delivering effective cloud services to clients are described in further detail below:
Capacity Planning
Nimbo facilitates business owners to plan for optimal resource usage by feeding in historic usage patterns and projected load collected over the course of a business lifecycle. Business owners can schedule for scaling up and down at designated times, plan for an average benchmarked load to be assigned throughout and also make informed decisions about resource allocations based on Nimbo's metering & usage reports. Thus, Nimbo helps the elasticity features of the underlying cloud solution to be customized for specific business requirements.
Load Balancing
Nimbo makes intelligent business decisions on load distribution based on the capacity planning metrics combined with active monitoring of traffic & performance. Dynamic scaling-up and scaling-down of resources for various work-groups is achieved on the fly with zero manual interference and with near zero latency. Nimbo also has its own load-balancer module, aided by a health-checker module.
Resource Monitoring & Management
Nimbo implements resource monitoring at all levels. It largely leverages virtualization technologies and accompanying tools to actively monitor and prevent failures/downtimes. During setup, a business owner or HCL admin can plan for failover for critical workloads. Once such workloads are identified, Nimbo actively monitors server/memory/storage/network/performance on such critical workloads and when it falls below a certain benchmark, performs a "Live Migration" to a failover setup thereby continuing the application with near zero downtime.
Self-Service
Nimbo's self-service portal is a clean abstraction of the underlying complexities and is an intuitive gateway for users/business owners into the Cloud. The portal implements an automated workflow for provisioning, provides the necessary interface to feed in business data, generates meaningful reports, and allows for specific customized services to be hosted over the portal.
