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Startup Nimbula has received $15 million in a second round of financing lead by the venture capital firm Accel Partners. Sequoia Capital, which led a $5 million first round, was also an investor in the second round.

The additional money will be used to continue Nimbula's investment in a hybrid cloud computing system aimed at allowing enterprises to build a private cloud that would interoperate with a public cloud. The company was founded in early 2009.

The CEO of Nimbula is Chris Pinkham, the former designer of the Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud. He and partner Willem van Bijon founded Nimbula to bring private controls and customization to an EC2-like infrastructure.

Nimbula has its cloud operating system, Director, out in a private beta test. It is intended to be an enterprise data center system, providing cloud features to internal resources, while controlling access to the external, public cloud. It includes policy-based authorization of users, multi-tenancy on servers, topology-independent distributed network security, and dynamic storage provisioning. The firm will stage an event Aug. 30 in San Francisco to show Nimbula features as VMware's annual user group meeting, VMworld, gets underway at the Moscone Center.

Director will work with open source Xen and KVM virtual machine formats in its initial iteration, with VMware's ESX Server to follow. A product release is slated for sometime this fall, Pinkham said in an interview earlier this month.

Accel Partners principal Ping Li joined Nimbula's board of directors as the financing was announced Aug. 23. "We have spoken with many customers looking for a solution. We identified Nimbula as the vendor having the technology and proven experience to capture the leadership position...," said Li.

Nimbula has been operating out of Sequoia Capital's offices for startups in Menlo Park, Calif., with a development team in Capetown, South Africa. The second round of funding will allow the 19-employee firm to eventually move into its own space.

"NImbula has moved with extraordinary speed and agility," claimed Roeloff Botha, a general partner at Sequoia who is also a member of the Nimbula board, along with Pinkham, Bijon, and Diane Greene, former co-founder and president of VMware.

Now that server virtualization is widespread, can we leverage it to make true business continuity a reality--or at least make recovering from disaster faster and less expensive? Download our report here (registration required).