Nebula, the startup, should not be confused with NASA's cloud computing infrastructure codenamed Nebula, on which OpenStack is based. NASA's Nebula was created as an alternative cloud platform after NASA ran into issues with Eucalyptus. It was open-sourced by NASA, Rackspace and other partners last July. We recently took a look at the origins of OpenStack.

OpenCompute was launched by Facebook last April as a way to open the standards and best practices it used to build its Prineville, OR data center.

According to GigaOM, Nebula has raised "tens of millions" of dollars from "Andy Bechtolsheim, David Cheriton and Ram Shriram -- Google's first three investors -- and venture firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Highland Capital Partners."

The big idea behind the company, Kemp said during his OSCon presentation today, is the democratization of big data and large scale computing. Kemp specifically called out how many brilliant people are busy working on serving ads.

We hear a lot about democratizing big data, high performance computing, etc. Some are more promising than others. Nebula, by offering a ready-built appliance to bring open cloud standards to any company or organization certainly falls into the "more promising" category.