
Introducing Nebula One private cloud system - jpadilla_
https://www.nebula.com/blog/2013/04/02/introducing-nebula-one/
======
Swannie
This looks like a great little system. Congrats to all the team. So many
questions!

The most important one: Is that Patrick Stewart doing the voice over in your
video? :-)

My only concern with the design is that it's not clear that clustering gives
you true redundancy, as it appears the 48 port 10gbps switch is integrated to
the same PSU as the controller, and could be a SPOF for a rack of servers?

I assume the switch is essentially running a completely separate control plane
from the x86 hardware, and forwarding plane, that can be controlled by other
appliances in the cluster?

~~~
keypusher
I think the idea is to have multiple nebula controllers, one per rack or so?
From 2nd page of The Register article:

"You can run a cloud with a single Nebula One controller, but the system was
designed to have multiple controllers for high availability and resiliency,
says Kemp. The Cosmos operating system can currently span as many as five
controllers in a single OpenStack controller domain and automatically load-
balances work across controllers and the five racks of servers attached to
them. With those five racks, you can have on the order of 2,500 cores and 5PB
of storage, depending on the servers you pick."

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/02/nebula_one_openstack...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/02/nebula_one_openstack_controller_appliance/page2.html)

~~~
Swannie
Yes, I think we both read that article correctly.

I'm saying that a rack full of servers is all hooked up to a single
controller. You then have multiple, interconnected controllers, each one
connecting a rack of servers. This is meant to give you HA and resiliency.

However, that is only true if the switch control plane is separate from the
x86 hardware running in the controller (because, here we're getting HA and
redundancy against the risk of controller hardware failure). I'd hope or
expect that to be the case, because Nebula has smart people, but I don't see
any material to that effect, yet.

(Typically a DC server farm will have two switches per rack of servers, with a
dual-homed server having a connection into each. Therefore if one switch dies,
you still have a redundant data path (though, only half the bandwidth)).

~~~
vishvananda
This is correct. The switch will continue to work if the x86 hardware fails.
In this case the other controllers will take over management of the servers
that are plugged in to the controller with the failed x86 hardware.

------
izak30
I work at Nebula, I'm happy to answer any questions.

~~~
monstrado
Hi, first off...the Nebula One looks great, really hope to try it out someday
at work.

Regarding the underlying framework, I'm not very familiar with OpenStack (we
use CloudStack right now), but is this a proprietary fork of OpenStack or are
you guys moving the project forward upstream?

~~~
vishvananda
Hi, I'm a nebula employee and I have been a key contributor to OpenStack since
its founding. We have not forked OpenStack and we are committed to making the
upstream project a success. We have some proprietary pieces around the control
plane, storage and UX, but we will continue to participate heavily in upstream
development and plan on integrating more OpenStack pieces as they stabilize.

~~~
jerdfelt
Hi Vish! When you say "proprietary pieces around the control plane", does that
mean inside or outside of nova?

~~~
vishvananda
Outside of nova.

------
incision
I've spent some time deploying Openstack on Cisco UCS and this box would seem
to replicate much of that functionality while adding versatility.

Pretty much exactly what I've wanted.

The benefit of converged infrastructure while leaving a choice in compute
vendor and integrating the controller, interconnect and orchestrator in a
single unit.

Very, very cool.

------
dkhenry
Really Awesome. This sounds like an awesome market to get into. I just spent
the last three days toying with various Data center visualization solutions
and they all suck ( even OpenStack) in terms of usability and accessibility.
It would be awesome to plug in a server and have all the power that OpenStack
promises up and running, maybe Nebula can do it.

------
ltcoleman
I really love this. I have been waiting for somebody to do this to OpenStack
and for it to be a team of original contributors makes me even more excited. I
would love to "cloud-enable" our server infrastructure.

------
Swannie
Another random question: does this require any special software on the managed
servers? For example, HP iLO Advanced, for additional server management
features? (Don't think so, but worth asking).

