Arik Hesseldahl

Recent Posts by Arik Hesseldahl

Startup Nebula Launches a Plug-and-Play Cloud Computer

Here’s a name I haven’t heard in a while: Anso Labs.

This was the cloud computing startup that originated at NASA, where the original ideas for OpenStack, the open source cloud computing platform, was born. Anso Labs was acquired by Rackspace a little more than two years ago.

It was a small team. But now a lot of the people who ran Anso Labs are back with a new outfit, still devoted to cloud computing, and still devoted to OpenStack. It’s called Nebula. And it builds a turnkey computer that will turn an ordinary rack of servers into a cloud-ready system, running — you guessed it — OpenStack.

Based in Mountain View, Calif., Nebula claims to have an answer for any company that has ever wanted to build its own private cloud system and not rely on outside vendors like Amazon or Hewlett-Packard or Rackspace to run it for them.

It’s called the Nebula One. And the setup is pretty simple, said Nebula CEO and founder Chris Kemp said: Plug the servers into the Nebula One, then you “turn it on and it boots up cloud.” All of the provisioning and management that a service provider would normally charge you for has been created on a hardware device. There are no services to buy, no consultants to pay to set it up. “Turn on the power switch, and an hour later you have a petascale cloud running on your premise,” Kemp told me.

The Nebula One sits at the top of a rack of servers; on its back are 48 Ethernet ports. It runs an operating system called Cosmos that grabs all the memory and storage and CPU capacity from every server in the rack and makes them part of the cloud. It doesn’t matter who made them — Dell, Hewlett-Packard or IBM.

Kemp named two customers: Genentech and Xerox’s research lab, PARC. There are more customer names coming, he says, and it already boasts investments from Kleiner Perkins, Highland Capital and Comcast Ventures. Nebula is also the only startup company that is a platinum member of the OpenStack Foundation. Others include IBM, HP, Rackspace, RedHat and AT&T.

If OpenStack becomes as easy to deploy as Kemp says it can be, a lot of companies — those that can afford to have their own data centers, anyway — are going to have their own clouds. And that is sort of the point.

Latest Video

View all videos »

Search »

I’m a giant vat of creative juices.

— David Pogue on why he’s joining Yahoo