Nebula One steps forth as world's first cloud computer

(Phys.org) —Nebula has announced its first product, Nebula One. The new entry is defined in a promotional video (with symphonic, celestial music and a British voiceover for gravitas) as the world's first cloud computer. The product combines a hardware controller integrated with software for an all in one storage, compute, and networked services system. To hear Nebula's team describe it, the Nebula One is a product that can reinvent cloud computing.

The controller itself is on sale now, at a starting price of $100,000, which may run higher, depending on the customer's needs and configurations.

The new Nebula One system must be coupled with certified industry-standard x86 servers. Customers can choose on their own which vendor's certified servers, such as from Dell, or HP, that they want to include as part of the system. The Nebula One controller can do all the pooling of resources from up to 20 server nodes, so that it can deliver its business customer a unified cloud system.

Nebula One's software could configure extra servers if and when they are added. A single-rack deployment is enough for most medium-sized businesses, but the Nebula One system can scale to multi-rack deployments for large enterprises.

Chris Kemp, co-founder and CEO of Nebula, who had served in CTO and CIO posts at NASA, along with his team, worked on their product with the intent of providing a cloud computer solution that can allow a business to go "self-service" in operating a private cloud infrastructure.

The Nebula One solution runs Cosmos, Nebula's distributed enterprise cloud operating system. which builds on OpenStack, according to the company's press release, providing compatibility with Amazon Web Services and OpenStack APIs.

(OpenStack, founded by Rackspace Hosting and NASA, is defined as a cloud operating system that controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, managed through a dashboard, that gives administrators control while empowering users to provision resources through a web interface. Its code is under the Apache license.)

The fundamental selling point of Nebula One is that it will make private clouds easier to operate. The goal underlying development of the new product has been to make a private cloud system something that the business user can plug in and turn on, achieving, at log-in, an availability of computing resources on demand. "Previous cloud solutions often required users to put in hours of work to provision and maintain their computing environment. The Nebula One private cloud system frees the organization to focus on applications instead of infrastructure," according to Nebula's team.

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