The former CTO of NASA wants to build the cloud-era sun Company

At the Oscon (Open source Convention), Chris C. Kemp, the former CTO of NASA, announced that he had created a cloud-computing venture with a dream team, named Nebula (meaning "nebula"). This is also the name of Kemp's NASA-led cloud computing project, which was later merged into OpenStack.

The information on the Nebula website shows that the company was actually established in April, in addition to Classmates.com, Escapia and other Internet companies and NASA's leading infrastructure development Kemp, the founder also includes Business Development Vice President Steve O ' Hara (Prime Networks,onfiber and CoreLogic founder) and vice president of Engineering Devin Carlen (Anson Labs former CTO and founder of the core framework Nova of the Nebula Project). The company's existing staff from Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Disney, are experienced software and hardware engineers.

Notably, Nebula is not ready to become a commercial version of open source software like Red Hat, a company self-introduction, saying "it will focus on making it easy, safe and low-cost for all businesses to deploy large, private cloud computing infrastructures." A hardware device has been developed to support businesses to build private clouds with hundreds of or thousands of of inexpensive computers. According to the TheRegister website, this device, called Nebula Enterprise Cloud Appliance, currently supports the server certified by the Facebook Open Compute Project and the Dell PowerEdge C micro-server , also includes a 48-port 10G Ethernet switch implemented with ASIC. The core of software is Nebula Cloud Controller, in addition to OpenStack and Arista Network Tools, Nebula has developed a number of specialized code, including a PB-level storage System, Distributed File system hooks (hooks), There are also some security features. Currently, up to 24 576 servers and 300,000 virtual machines are supported. Although the Kemp to the OpenStack 1 million node and 60 million virtual machine design goals still distance, but is a very beautiful starting point. Future nebula devices will also work with other companies in the entire cloud-computing ecosystem, including NoSQL and Hadoop partners, Gigaom reported.

Nebula is not a real open source company, most of its own software and hardware will not be submitted to the OpenStack and open compute projects. However, Kemp said that after the company's large-scale recruitment, 50 engineers will be mainly engaged in the development of OpenStack core. Other optimization codes developed by the company also contribute to the OpenStack project.

Kemp admits that he did not want to develop the equipment at first, but the original investor Andy Bechtolsheim, the founder of Sun Corporation, Google investor, persuaded him to offer a turnkey solution to the business more in line with market demand. The company's seed investors also include two other Google investors, David Cheriton and Ram Shriram. A round of investors have Kleiner and Highland capital.

Andy Bechtolsheim said in a statement that nebula today's OpenStack is like Sun in the 1980 's for Berkeley Unix, proprietary systems will not compete with open platforms, and Nebula will be the leader of the private cloud market. Nebula's products are fairly complete solutions that cover core systems, storage, networking, security, and indeed ambitious. But it will not only face Emc/vmware, Citrix (just acquired Cloud.com, and has announced the launch of the OpenStack commercial version), Cisco, Dell (has released reference architectures and software for OpenStack) and even Rackspace (OpenStack's main support, acquisition Anso Labs is also providing more solution support) and other giants compete, And there are piston such as Brother startups in the back of a tight chase. Piston's CEO and co-founder Joshua McKenty, a cloud infrastructure architect for NASA's Nebula project, just got 4.5 million dollars this month.

In any case, it is an indisputable fact that cloud computing is surging everywhere in the world.

(Responsible editor: admin)