Nebula, the self-proclaimed cloud systems startup, introduced its flagship offering this week. Wikibon senior analyst Stu Miniman discussed the news and provided more details about the “world’s first enterprise cloud computer” in a recent NewsDesk segment.

The solution, appropriately named Nebula One, ships with the startup’s OpenStack-based cloud OS and a homegrown controller. It is compatible with industry-standard servers from Dell and HP, and support for select IBM models is expected to be added in the near future.

According to Miniman, the system was built to address one of OpenStack’s major drawbacks: the difficult and time-consuming manual configuration process.  He notes that giving customers the freedom to purchase whichever server brand they want is inline with OpenStack’s vendor-neutral model, an important selling point for the type of clients that Nebula is targeting with the appliance.

Miniman stresses that the same rules that apply to Linux also apply to OpenStack: it’s not all about the software.   He goes to discuss Nebula’s choice of hardware:

“As OpenStack matures you’re going to have more flexibility with the hardware you can buy: on the server side x86 is though to differentiate on hardware, it’s just how many cores, how dense we can build them and what packing we have. There are some feature functions that enterprise users want, but if you look in the hyperscale and virtualized market[s] it’s becoming together to differentiate on those. In the storage world, Nebula has flash in their environment.”

Based on what Nebula One attempts to achieve, and the fact pricing starts at $100,000 per unit, Miniman believes that buying the appliance would only make sense for financial institutions and other large buyers. These are organizations with growth models that depend on a simple, provider-grade private cloud environment.

See the full segment on NewsDesk here: