Canonical's Cloud-In-A-Box: Under The Hood

Canonical's Ubuntu Linux-powered Orange Box, with its 10 servers in a single container, is the perfect cloud sampler

Canonical's Ubuntu Linux-powered Orange Box, with its 10 servers in a single container, is the perfect cloud sampler.  I'm a lucky man. I'm one of the first people to actually get my hands on Canonical's Ubuntu-Linux powered Orange Box.  The Orange Box  (PDF Link) is a cloud-in-a-box — a complete mobile cluster. It's designed for OpenStack cloud testing, cloud prototyping, and proof of concept. Each Orange Box comes pre-loaded with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Metal as a Service (MaaS), and Juju — Canonical's DevOps program.

Inside the Orange Box, you'll find 10 Intel micro-servers, aka Next Unit of Computing (NUC). Each is powered by Ivy Bridge i5-3427U CPUs. Each mini-server has four cores, Intel HD Graphics 4000, 16GBs of DDR3 RAM, a 128GB SSD root disk, and a Gigabit Ethernet port. The first micro-server also includes a Centrino Advanced-N 6235 Wi-Fi Adapter, and 2TB Western Digital hard drive. These are all connected in a cluster with a D-Link Gigabit switch.  Put it all together and you get a 40-core, 160GB RAM, 1.2TB SSD cluster in a 37.4 pound box...