Former NASA CTO Launches Cloud Startup Nebula -- Redmond Channel Partner

The Schwartz
Cloud Reportby Jeffrey Schwartz, Executive Editor

Former NASA CTO Launches Cloud Startup Nebula

Chris Kemp, who stepped down as CTO of NASA back in March, has launched a startup company called Nebula that offers a turnkey appliance based on the OpenStack platform.

OpenStack is the open source project co-developed by NASA and Rackspace Hosting. Nebula came out of stealth mode last week by announcing that it has developed an appliance that it said will allow organizations to create large private clouds using thousands of commodity computers. Nebula is named after the project Kemp oversaw at the NASA Ames Research Center.

"Until today, this computing power has only been accessible to organizations like NASA and a small number of elite Silicon Valley companies," Kemp said in a statement. "We intend to bring it to the rest of the world."

The company was seeded by Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, along with investors David Cheriton and Ram Shriram, who all were the first to invest in Google. Nebula also has secured funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Highland Capital Partners.

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on August 03, 2011

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