A Case for Cloud - Colorado Technology Association - Chris Kemp, Nebula Co-Founder

getting to cloud

Speaking from the Governor's mansion in Denver, Chris Kemp, explained the birth of OpenStack from his CTO role at NASA and the subsequent commercialization of Nebula, the first cloud computer.

Who might need a cloud computer?  Startup business can trade-off the use of cloud services through an anonymity. However, when those monthly bills reach $100k and the core business relies on the protection of its data and intellectual property, it is time to manage your own private cloud.

Chris' vision of computing based on current trending of tablet sales outpacing desktop computers and 15% of internet access coming from mobile devices, he sees the future of centralized apps and data in massive datacenters serving dozens of sensing computers per person. However, current datacenter architecture physically separates enormous storage devices from large racks of servers which won't serve anytime, anywhere mobile demand.

How do you afford a cloud? Cloud controllers, like Nebula, can integrate massive storage and cheap server computing inside the same rack thanks to recent performance gains in SSD harddrives and CPU technologies (like ARM chips). Where virtualization provides the efficient use of servers, by creating up to 10 server environments to serve multiple applications, an enterprise will use the most robust blade hardware to minimize outages. A cloud controller manages 20 servers in one rack, treating them all as a single server resource with flexible processing power. The enterprise will use inexpensive 2U servers that are hot-swappable.

While the largest enterprises will build their own private clouds from OpenStack standards, everyone can own a cloud now.


Chris Kemp, former NASA CTO and co-founder of OpenStack & Nebula, spoke to Denver technologists about a cloud controller, how to drive cloud adoption and stop storing petabytes of information separate from computing servers.