

Hands-on with Canonical’s Orange Box and a peek into cloud nirvana - ghosh
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/06/hands-on-with-canonicals-orange-box-and-a-peek-into-cloud-nirvana/

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panzi
When I read "Orange Box" I still first think of this:
[http://store.steampowered.com/sub/469/](http://store.steampowered.com/sub/469/)

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trhway
20 cores i5 @ 1.8GHz , 160G RAM, 1.2T SSD for $12K.

My [at a BigCo] HP workstation has 16 cores i7 @ 2.6GHz, 256G RAM, 1T SSD -
about $10K. Of course it doesn't consume 320W power - its power unit is
something like 1KW :)

I'd wonder what is advantages of Intel NUC in such a cluster setup over say
using microATX boards with 4 core i5 and 32 GB per board.

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wmf
As the article says, the Orange Box is not about specs or price. It's a
cluster in a box to demo MaaS.

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druiid
Sure, but I think what the poster is trying to get at is.. why couldn't you
make a configuration using the NUC's that was more than a demo environment? I
don't see any reason you couldn't as long as your infrastructure doesn't care
about what happens to single nodes.

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tormeh
Yeah, lots of reliable services are built using cheap, unreliable parts,
because it's often cheaper to have redundant nodes and replace the ones that
break than to buy more reliable stuff.

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misframer
No ECC RAM support. I'm guessing this isn't for "serious" use?

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dsr_
The article says so several times: this is demo hardware. It goes out on the
road in a single case and shows you what you can do on a 10-node system.

No failover power. No internal redundant networking (each node only has one
NIC, and there's one switch acting as the backplane. One control master unit,
specially wired up so that it can be a console. No redundant storage anywhere.
Probably no clustered filesystem, though you could put one in... but not that
much I/O to deal with the outside world.

