Former chief technology officer of NASA, Chris Kemp, along with his team have launch their space shuttle not to reach to the stars but to the clouds with their latest venture Nebula. The new OpenStack appliance company Nebula will sell an OpenStack based appliances for managing cloud computing. Nebula will offer inexpensive hardware and software solution to business to deploy large private cloud computing infrastructure. In a gathering with Facebook and Rackspace at OSCON today, Nebula unveiled its own appliances.

The company will be funded by impressive list of investors including Google’s Andy Bechtolsheim, David Cheriton and Ram Shriram; venture firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Highland Capital Partners.

Nebula team will be headed by Co-founder and CEO Kemp along with co-founder and Vice President of Engineering Devin Carlen, formerly CTO of Anso Labs, and Vice President of Business Development Steve O’Hara. The Nova code to control NASA’s Nebula cloud is written by Anso Labs. Nebula will also hire rich talent of software and hardware architects with industry experience at Google, Amazon, Walt Disney and Microsoft.

“Nebula is very committed to building the core OpenStack code base. OpenStack exists because Eucalyptus didn’t work at NASA,” Kemp said. “A better OpenStack means a better Nebula because Nebula can focus on filling in the gaps and not on reinventing the wheel. Much like Bechtolsheim was successful at Sun Microsystems by building atop Unix and at Arista by using standard hardware components.”

It will be offering customized OpenStack software and Arista networking tools with its own hardware appliance solution to business. Nebula would offer petabyte-scale storage system with enterprise features and support as found in mega storage vendor like EMC and NetApp. All their appliances are based on the OpenCompute standards.

Nebula is hoping its appliance would serve companies as the delivery model for the entire cloud based ecosystem. Nebula will be competing with industry big players like Dell, HP and IBM. More number of initiatives building is opening up around open source cloud development. This week Dell launched a new offering that is based on Cactus, the latest version of open-source cloud operating system OpenStack. Dell’s OpenStack Cloud Solution is designed for web hosting and powered by Dell PowerEdge C Series servers. The software-only open source storage solution provider, Gluster, has released its first major update for OpenStack today. Gluster latest update would provide highly scalable and available VM storage functionality for OpenStack’s open source cloud platform. Startup, Piston Cloud Computing, recently raised $4.5 million for its business around the OpenStack infrastructure.