Nebula democratizes cloud, is now open to all

PORTLAND, USA: Nebula announced plans for a turnkey OpenStack hardware appliance that will allow all businesses to deploy large private cloud computing infrastructures from computers..

Nebula was launched by a team of engineers and entrepreneurs and led by former NASA CTO Chris C. Kemp.

Until today, this computing power has only been accessible to organizations such as NASA and a small number of Silicon Valley companies,” said Kemp, CEO of Nebula. “We intend to bring it to the rest of the world.”

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Seeded by Google’s first investors Andy Bechtolsheim, David Cheriton and Ram Shriram, Nebula has secured venture financing from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Highland Capital Partners.

“Nebula will disrupt and democratize cloud computing,” said John Doerr, partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. “As original creators of OpenStack, this team has the unique expertise to deliver simplicity, scale, speed and low cost for enterprise cloud computing.”

Nebula incorporates and builds on OpenStack, the open source, standards-based cloud platform being used at NASA and other large cloud service providers.

“Nebula embracing OpenStack today is similar to Sun embracing Berkeley UNIX in the 1980s,” said Andy Bechtolsheim. “Proprietary systems did not have a chance against open platforms. I see Nebula as the company that will bring OpenStack to the private enterprise cloud.”

In addition to supporting standard commodity servers from today’s enterprise vendors, Nebula will support Facebook’s Open Compute platform.

Nebula is expanding its operations and building its team, which includes co-founders Steve O’Hara and Devin Carlen, OpenStack pioneers, and top engineers and executives formerly with Google, NASA, Amazon, Disney, Dell, Anso Labs, Rackspace and Microsoft.

Product trials with energy, finance, biotech and media companies are expected to begin in Q4 2011.