Nebula looks to democratize cloud computing with open source hardware

A new company launched at the Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland, Ore. today is making a bid to disrupt the enterprise information technology market. Nebula will combine open source technology developed at NASA with open source hardware developed at Facebook into an appliance that Nebula CEO Chris Kemp is calling a "cloud controller." If Facebook's Open Compute Project looked like a big step forward for infrastructure, operations and the web, Nebula looks like it might be a giant leap. If Nebula succeeds, it could enable every company to implement cloud computing..

"As people face this industrial revolution of big data, they can't use Oracle anymore," said Kemp in an interview at OSCON. "It doesn't scale. We want to be the platform that enables that. We really believe that, if all of this stuff will achieve its potential, in being open, it will reshape the core of computing. We really think there's this new paradigm of computing where people are building on top of infrastructure services instead of infrastructure." Video of the Nebula launch at OSCON is embedded below....

...The question that Kemp and his team asked themselves was how they could take OpenStack in its current open source state and make it accessible to everyone. "OpenStack is a great platform," he said. "It's where Linux was 25 years ago. It's like Sun in the early '80s." Now, Kemp says, he hopes to see open source hardware grow in the same way...