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Nebula Debuts 'Cloud Computer' Based On OpenStack

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the built-out-of-actual-clouds dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes "The Nebula One is being positioned as a 'cloud computer' that can connect preconfigured servers to a private cloud using an OpenStack-based OS. The idea, according to former NASA CIO Chris Kemp, is to spin up a private cloud in as little as an hour. Even so, while a pitch on the company's homepage (narrated by none other than Patrick Stewart) may sound like the company can take any old CPU, storage, and memory resources and combine them together, buyers actually have only a small selection of servers from which to choose. The company's secret sauce is its Nebula Cosmos software, based upon the OpenStack cloud OS, which pools all compute and local storage within a system to provide a cloud-level aggregation of resources for all users. Users are presented with quotas and limits, within which they can spin up their own instances, deploy applications, and manage their own storage resources. If that sounds somewhat simple, well, that's the whole point. Three key investors who backed Google—Andy Bechtolsheim, David Cheriton and Ram Shriram—have also put money into Nebula, and the company has operated quietly out of the spotlight for several years."

20 comments

  1. Stewart? by girlintraining · · Score: 4, Funny

    Rack Space... The Final Front Tier... These are the stories of the USS Cloud Storage. It's continuing mission... to seek out new code, to explore strange new infrastructure... to boldly go where too many men have gone before.

    --
    #fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
    1. Re:Stewart? by Samantha+Wright · · Score: 1

      Ooh, you're cruisin' for some troll points, I can smell it.

      Any real geek would know that the in TNG version, "man" was replaced with "one"!

      ...

      Ha ha! You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders - The most famous of which is "never get involved in a land war in Asia" - but only slightly less well-known is this: "Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line"! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha...

      --
      Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
    2. Re:Stewart? by girlintraining · · Score: 1

      Ooh, you're cruisin' for some troll points, I can smell it. Any real geek would know that the in TNG version, "man" was replaced with "one"!

      What is this, some kind of jedi mind meld trick to distract us from the real issues here?

      *cough*

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      #fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
    3. Re:Stewart? by MickLinux · · Score: 1

      These are not the allusions you are searching for.

      --
      Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
    4. Re:Stewart? by Spy+Handler · · Score: 1

      The trouble with the Nebula, sir, is all that static discharge from the Cloud. Visual won't function, and our shields will be useless.

  2. This sounds vaguely familiar... by Majik+Sheff · · Score: 2

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs

    --
    Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
  3. Google Uses Ganeti by evilviper · · Score: 3, Informative

    If you're looking for inexpensive and simple, you should consider Google's Ganeti.

    Google uses it pretty heavily in their offices. It's simple to manage (command-line) and has some unique features, like being based on DRBD so it uses local storage and doesn't need anything like a SAN, and reads (but not writes) going as fast as local storage, rather than bottlenecked by the interconnect you're using.

    See the interesting hour-long speech about how they're using it, available in MP4 and WebM:

    https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa12/ganeti-your-private-virtualization-cloud-way-google-does-it

    Or just the PDF of the slideshow: http://whatexit.org/tal/PICC12/Ganeti-90.pdf

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    1. Re:Google Uses Ganeti by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ganeti as awesome. All our production is based on that (200+ VMs).

    2. Re:Google Uses Ganeti by Lennie · · Score: 1

      Google in production using something else I'm sure.

      I'm pretty sure Google is using containers (or at least something like cgroups) for most of their workloads to do what they do:

      http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/03/google-borg-twitter-mesos/

      http://incubator.apache.org/mesos/

      --
      New things are always on the horizon
    3. Re:Google Uses Ganeti by swillden · · Score: 0

      Google uses Ganeti and Borg. Different solutions for different problems.

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    4. Re:Google Uses Ganeti by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If you're looking for inexpensive and simple, you should consider Google's Ganeti.

      Maybe you should also check Synnefo out. It's an open source IaaS cloud platform, compliant with the OpenStack APIs, which uses Ganeti at its core, for the VM cluster management.

  4. AKA - "Cloud Factory" by TapeCutter · · Score: 1

    Coincidentally I was looking at a Japanese flow chart this morning. It was describing the overall architecture of some proprietary admin software for use in data centers, the only (auto-translated) text that made any real sense to me was the box labeled "Cloud Factory".

    --
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  5. ... Nebula? by CAIMLAS · · Score: 1

    So what exactly is Nebula? That article is horrible.

    Is it just me, or does this new 'cloud' tool have absolutely nothing to do with OpenNebula (which abbreviates itself ONE), a competitor to OpenStack?

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    1. Re:... Nebula? by eksith · · Score: 1

      I agree. The article and the site are nebulous.

      I guess it's a dedicated server with fancy LCDs for status (like on some gaming rigs), except it's a storage and/or compute node. Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!

      --
      If computers were people, I'd be a misanthrope.
    2. Re:... Nebula? by Paradigm_Complex · · Score: 1

      > So what exactly is Nebula?

      From what I understand (and I may be mistaken):

      Nebula in this context is a company who has released a product called "Nebula One," which is a server setup. Nebula One runs OpenStack and some proprietary Nebula software.

      The target audience for Nebula One are the companies who are inclined to outsource server stuff to "the cloud" - ie, don't want to worry about the work/responsibility to maintain their own servers - but also don't want to have their information in the hands of a third party such as Amazon. Nebula One is intended to be a "it just works" server solution for many cloud-computing type things, such as managing many VMs or data redundancy. Nebula also provides support for the product. Ideally, the best of all worlds: ease-of-use and dedicated-support of clouds without the privacy or dependency issues.

      I kind of think of it as the RHEL of cloud-related-server stuff. If you're savvy enough and do-it-yourself enough, you might be able to build and maintain something comparable yourself. However, some companies are in a position where paying another company for the setup work and support is a better choice.

      > That article is horrible.

      Agreed.

      > Is it just me, or does this new 'cloud' tool have absolutely nothing to do with OpenNebula (which abbreviates itself ONE), a competitor to OpenStack?

      I'm not familiar with OpenNebula, but from the sound of it - no, they're not related, beyond being a competing codebase. They might have a similar etymology, though. NASA worked on a "Nebula" computing platform which is related to OpenStack - I wouldn't be surprised if OpenNebula also spun off from NASA's Nebula. The CEO of Nebula-the-company worked on (headed?) NASA's Nebula.

      There's also an Eve Online group called "Nebula". The product "Nebula One" has some legitimate promise IMO, but the name is ripe for causing confusion.

      --
      "A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
    3. Re:... Nebula? by jon3k · · Score: 1

      Just a platform for deploying and managing a big openstack installation. You could call it cluster management software I guess.

    4. Re:... Nebula? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      a clusterfuck...

    5. Re:... Nebula? by CAIMLAS · · Score: 1

      The problem is, that is precisely what OpenNebula (ONE) is, as well, at least in part. :P

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      ~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
  6. Some call it "cloud" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ...others call it client/server architecture.

  7. ObMeme by dwye · · Score: 1

    This being slashdot, somebody has to ask this, and I guess it comes to me:

    How is this essentially different from setting up a Beowulf cluster of whatever servers that Nebula One supports?

    Alternately: Just think of a Beowulf Cluster of these Nebula One clouds.