Nebula, an OpenStack pioneer, is closing its doors
Converged infrastructure vendor Nebula, one of the first companies to pioneer integrated OpenStack-based private cloud hardware, announced it will close its doors this week.
A notice posted by the Nebula management team on its website says the company had no choice but to cease operations after exhaustively searching for alternative arrangements that would allow the company to keep operating.
“When we started this journey four years ago, we set out to usher in a new era of cloud computing by curating and productizing OpenStack for the enterprise. We are incredibly proud of the role we had in establishing Nebula as the leading enterprise cloud computing platform. At the same time, we are deeply disappointed that the market will likely take another several years to mature. As a venture backed start up, we did not have the resources to wait.”
“Nebula private clouds deployed at customer sites will continue to operate normally, however support will no longer be available. Nebula is based on OpenStack and is compatible with OpenStack products from vendors including Red Hat, IBM, HP and others, providing customers with a number of choices moving forward.”
One of the original players behind the OpenStack codebase, Nebula offered Nebula Cosmos, a fast and secure deployment, management, and monitoring tool for enterprise-grade OpenStack private clouds, and converged infrastructure solutions based on x86 servers running OpenStack- the Nebula One.
Nearly five years after the creation of OpenStack the market is clearly still in its early stages despite loads of vendor hype and a flurry of acquisitions in this space. Indeed, the first challenge for independents like Nebula is their ability to gain critical mass and maintain operations – at least before being acquired by firms like Cisco, Red Hat, HP and other IT vendors that have snapped OpenStack startups in recent years in a bid to grow their portfolios based on the open source platform; the second is, of course, competing with the Ciscos, Red Hats and HPs of the world, which is no small feat.