14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical has announced the Orange Box, a mobile cluster that packs Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, MAAS, and Juju and that is capable of becoming a cloud server with the “touch of a button.”
You might wonder what you can do with your personal cloud. For the regular user, the Orange Box holds no particular interest, but companies will find it more than interesting, especially if they rely on huge networks and cloud services.
The Orange Box was designed by Canonical, but it's custom built by TranquilPC. This is basically a 10-node cluster computer, but the hardware specs are actually quite impressive. Each node is comprised of an Intel i5-3427U CPU, 16GB DDR3 RAM, 120GB SSD Storage, an Intel HD4000 GPU, and Intel Gigabit network interface.
Also, 4 of the 10 nodes include additional SSD storage and 1 of the 10 nodes features Intel Wi-Fi and a 2TB HDD. As you would expect, the Orange Box comes with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 64-bit, MAAS, Juju, Ubuntu archive mirror, and 1 year of Ubuntu Advantage support.
“In aggregate, this micro cluster effectively fields 40 cores, 160GB of RAM, 1.2TB of solid state storage, and is connected over an internal gigabit network fabric. A single fan quietly cools the power supply, while all of the nodes are passively cooled by aluminum heat sinks spanning each side of the chassis. All in a chassis the size of a tower PC!”
“The Orange Box provides a spectacular development platform, showcasing in mere minutes the power of hardware provisioning and service orchestration with Ubuntu, MAAS, Juju, and Landscape. OpenStack, Hadoop, CloudFoundry, and hundreds of other workloads deploy in minutes, to real hardware -- not just instances in AWS! It also makes one hell of a Steam server -- there's a charm for that,” said Dustin Kirkland, Canonical's Cloud Solutions product manager.
Even though Canonical didn't initially want to enter the hardware market, it seems that they found a more productive way of doing it, besides Ubuntu Edge.
The Orange Box sounds like a great solution, but you can imagine that it doesn't come cheap. Also, the support for this kind of service will also cost, if you ever decide to get it. The good news is that Canonical will help any company learn how to use it and they will allow a two-week testing period for the cluster, with or without their assistance.
You can find out more hardware details about the Orange Box on Canonical's website.