Nebula builds cheaper clouds

The former CTO of NASA and co-founder of OpenStack unveiled an appliance designed to make it easy for enterprises to build private clouds, reports PC World.

“The idea is to eliminate the customisation required to build most private clouds,” explains Chris Kemp, CEO and founder of Nebula, the company offering the appliance.

He says users could theoretically plug hundreds of the appliances together to run tens of thousands of compute nodes and petabytes of storage. The company claims it's working on the next release of the product, which would support exascale storage.

IT Pro reveals that Facebook is teaming up with Nebula with the view of open sourcing its server and data centre technologies.

The move, as predicted by industry experts, has been taken by the company with the hope that more companies will start deploying private clouds with cheaper hardware being made available to them.

By taking advantage of open source technologies, the technology start-up will create hardware appliances with all of the necessary software for companies to create their own low-cost data centre computers, states Venture Beat.

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 big tech companies such as Facebook or Google.