The Orange Box: Cloud for the Free Man

It was September of 2009.  I answered a couple of gimme trivia questions and dropped my business card into a hat at a Linux conference in Portland, Oregon.  A few hours later, I received an email...I had just "won" a developer edition HTC Dream -- the Android G1.  I was quite anxious to have a hardware platform where I could experiment with Android.  I had, of course, already downloaded the SDK, compiled Android from scratch, and fiddled with it in an emulator.  But that experience fell far short of Android running on real hardware.  Until the G1.  The G1 was the first device to truly showcase the power and potential of the Android operating system.

And with that context, we are delighted to introduce the Orange Box!

The Orange Box

Conceived by Canonical and custom built by TranquilPC, the Orange Box is a 10-node cluster computer, that fits in a suitcase.

Ubuntu, MAAS, Juju, Landscape, OpenStack, Hadoop, CloudFoundry, and more!

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 ;-)

OpenStack deployed by Juju, takes merely 6 minutes on an Orange Box

Most developers here certainly recognize the term "SDK", or "Software Development Kit"...  You can think of the Orange Box as a "HDK", or "Hardware Development Kit".  Pair an Orange Box with MAAS and Juju, and you have yourself a compact cloud.  Or a portable big data number cruncher.  Or a lightweight cluster computer.

The underside of an Orange Box, with its cover off

Want to get your hands on one?

Drop us a line, and we'd be delighted to hand-deliver an Orange Box to your office, and conduct 2 full days of technical training, covering MAAS, Juju, Landscape, and OpenStack.  The box is yours for 2 weeks, as you experiment with the industry leading Ubuntu ecosystem of cloud technologies at your own pace and with your own workloads.  We'll show back up, a couple of weeks later, to review what you learned and discuss scaling these tools up, into your own data center, on your own enterprise hardware.  (And if you want your very own Orange Box to keep, you can order one from our friends at TranquilPC.)

Manufacturers of the Orange Box

Gear head like me?  Interested in the technical specs?


Remember those posts late last year about Intel NUCs?  Someone took notice, and we set out to build this ;-)

Each Orange Box chassis contains:

• 10x Intel NUCs
• Specifically, the Ivy Bridge D53427RKE model, chosen for its support of Intel AMT
• All 10x Intel NUCs contain
• i5-3427U CPU
• Intel HD Graphics 4000 GPU
• 16GB of DDR3 RAM
• 120GB SSD root disk
• Intel Gigabit ethernet
• D-Link DGS-1100-16 managed gigabit switch with 802.1q VLAN support
• All 10 nodes are internally connected to this gigabit switch
• 100-240V AC/DC power supply
• Adapter supplied for US, UK, and EU plug types
• 19V DC power supplied to each NUC
• 5V DC power supplied to internal network switch

Intel NUC D53427RKE board

That's basically an Amazon EC2 m3.xlarge ;-)

The first node, node0, additionally contains:

• An Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6235 WiFi adapter
• A 2TB Western Digital HDD, preloaded with a full Ubuntu archive mirror
• USB and HDMI ports are wired and accessible from the rear of the box

Most planes fly in clouds...this cloud flies in planes!

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!

It fits in a suit case, and can travel anywhere you go.

Pelican iM2875 Storm Case

How are we using them at Canonical?

If you're here at the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta, GA, you'll see at least a dozen Orange Boxes, in our booth, on stage during Mark Shuttleworth's keynote, and in our breakout conference rooms.

Canonical sales engineer, Ameet Paranjape,
demonstrating OpenStack on the Orange Box in the Ubuntu booth
at the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta, GA

We are also launching an update to our OpenStack Jumpstart program, where we'll deliver and Orange Box and 2 full days of training to your team, and leave you the box while you experiment with OpenStack, MAAS, Juju, Hadoop, and more for 2 weeks.  Without disrupting your core network or production data center workloads,  prototype your OpenStack experience within a private sandbox environment. You can experiment with various storage alternatives, practice scaling services, destroy and rebuild the environment repeatedly. Safe. Risk free.


This is Cloud, for the Free Man.

:-Dustin