A new hardware version of OpenStack is now available from Nebula, the company that spun out of the NASA Nebula cloud under Chris Kemp, the former CIO of the federal agency.
The Nebula One cloud controller is a single product rather than a set of loosely associated software components. Until now, OpenStack has appeared in the marketplace as a set of components included in major Linux distributions from Red Hat, Suse or Ubuntu. The Nebula One is instead a hardware appliance that fits into the 2u slot of a rack. The customer simply selects a standard two-CPU server of choice, plugs the device into the slot of the controller, and the OpenStack cloud comes to life on the rack. Like the controller itself, the server slots in the rack may be equipped with servers of the customer’s choice.
Although some assembly is involved, little has been left for the customer to decide. The Nebula One’s combination of server, storage and memory is largely preordained. Server choices are narrowed down to either an HP DL 380p Gen 8, an IBM X series model still being certified, or a Dell r720xd. The three selections are similarly configured x86 servers and each of them is a 2u addition to the rack, like the Nebula One controller.