Nebula Debuts 'Cloud Computer' Based On OpenStack 20
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."
Google Uses Ganeti (Score:4, Informative)
If you're looking for inexpensive and simple, you should consider Google's Ganeti [google.com].
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 [usenix.org]
Or just the PDF of the slideshow: http://whatexit.org/tal/PICC12/Ganeti-90.pdf [whatexit.org]