Nebula Aims To Deliver OpenStack Cloud Control

The open source OpenStack project provides a powerful software platform for cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) deployment. But what about hardware? That's a question startup Nebula is aiming to answer with its OpenStack server cloud controller platform that will combine server hardware and software.

Nebula is led by CEO Chris Kemp, who formerly was the CTO of NASA and leader of the team responsible for building the Nova compute project that is at the core of OpenStack. Kemp left NASA two years ago to found Nebula, which has been working toward making OpenStack more consumable by enterprises. "We have worked very hard to create a product that captures the simplicity of a consumer electronics device but delivers it as an enterprise appliance," Kemp said.

That enterprise appliance enables organizations to take many racks of inexpensive servers and allows them to be used just like a public cloud infrastructure without any up-front install, engineering or operational overhead. So instead of requiring organizations to figure out how to get OpenStack running on their own, Nebula is aiming to deliver a turnkey experience...