Ex-NASA CTO opens cloud start-up

The cloud computing world has been anxious to hear former NASA CTO Chris Kemp's plans since he left his post in the spring to pursue a start-up venture, and on Wednesday morning, he introduced his new company, Nebula, according to Reuters.

Forbes says at NASA, Kemp started the Nebula project, a private cloud computing system to handle the massive data load of the US space agency.

NASA eventually made the underlying technology into an open source project called OpenStack, which now has been supported by companies like Rackspace Hosting. OpenStack enables companies to set up their own private cloud computing networks that are otherwise offered as services by companies such as Amazon with its EC2 service.

Nebula has loaded OpenStack onto an appliance, adding security and management features aimed at making the appliance work well with existing compliance and security procedures in enterprises, says PCWorld.

It's designed to work with the cheapest available servers. Each appliance has a 10GB switch and 48 ports, so 24 2U servers can connect to it.

If it succeeds, Nebula could commoditise the major hardware makers and possibly any company that gets big margins out of data centre computing. It will allow small companies to deploy data centres much like those run by the likes of huge companies such as Facebook or Google reports VentureBeat.