Page 238 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

MANA GEMENT STRATEGIES F O R THE CL OUD R EV OL UTION

NASA’s data sets available to the public,” according to the
Nebula Web site.
Nevertheless, NASA’s Nebula illustrates how cloud com-
puting can further a set of strategic goals that hitherto have
been too expensive or too time-consuming for each data cen-
ter in the agency to implement on its own.

The Nebula cloud, like most other cloud operations, en-
ables user self-provisioning. It runs virtual machines that are
the equivalent of Amazon Machine Images under the open
source hypervisor Xen. As a matter of fact, one way to study
how to establish an Amazon Web Services–compatible private
cloud—that is, one in which applications and virtual machines
will be interchangeable with Amazon’s EC2—is to learn from

NASA’s example.
NASA’s approach to cloud computing nevertheless ties
the technology to the overall mission of the agency. NASA’s
Ames Research Center illustrates how it has linked certain ac-
tivities to cloud computing and how it plans to use cloud com-
puting to achieve certain strategic goals.
As Nebula is a work in progress, not enough is known about
it to say that it offers a pattern that businesses can use to achieve
their own strategic goals. It’s not known, for example, how

much management software NASA has had to write itself to
use with Nebula open source code or whether it has enlisted
commercial products. But if future reports make it clear that
Nebula is being invoked as a successful example by other
agencies of the federal government, many businesses could
profit from studying its example. It will have set a pattern
for a standardized, easy-to-manage data center built to take

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