NASA's Nebula a Possible Federal Cloud Prototype

nextgov.com reports that a NASA cloud computing model, called Nebula is being looked at by NASA and the Obama administration for federal agencies to outsource IT services to a shared platform. "A significant journey ahead" may be an understatement -- an estimated 10 year migration would have several hurdles to manage.

NASA's Chris Kemp is working with the federal government's could computing working group. NASA CIO's Chris Kemp and Linda Cureton have blogs that I have been following for a while now. Chris managed the Google relationship and talks of the larger strategy with NASA and Google, Microsoft and Cisco. The NASA/Ames Research Center has the current #4 supercomputer (Pleiades), a SGI Altix ICE 8200 wiht a measly 51TB of memory.

Federal CIO Vivek Kundra held a live chat several weeks back and has pretty ambitious plans for federal IT and data. You can see that even Vivek Kundra learned from Google -- the IT Dashboard site (very nice by the way) has a "beta" stamp on it.

Like many commercial data center consolidation projects, the federal government has about 70 data centers with "various levels of efficiency and availability that NASA is trying to contract to two outsourced data centers".

"Obama's fiscal 2010 budget proposal envisions optimizing cloud computing by "scaling pilots to full capabilities and providing financial support to accelerate migration," the budget stated. The fiscal plan acknowledges the effort will involve upfront costs, but the expense should be more than offset by savings from consolidating data centers."

Let's see -- one cloud with Google and one with Microsoft -- and then use all Cisco gear to network them together. :)

Check out the nextgov.com article here.