
The Orange Box: Cloud for the Free Man - jcastro
http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2014/05/the-orange-box-cloud-for-free-man.html
======
sargun
So, I wouldn't use this box because it doesn't ECC Memory
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_memory](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_memory)).
Google some years ago did a study on DRAM errors in the wild, in order to
determine if there was an actual need for ECC in modern datacenters /
distributed computing applications
([http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf](http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf)).
The short summary was that yes, they did need it.

Given that the processors ([http://ark.intel.com/products/64903/Intel-
Core-i5-3427U-Proc...](http://ark.intel.com/products/64903/Intel-
Core-i5-3427U-Processor-3M-Cache-up-to-2_80-GHz)) that are on these NUCs don't
support ECC, I would probably avoid these units for any real workload.

It bums me a out a little bit that there is only a 1G fabric on these, when
each board has two mini-PCIe ports, which is at 2Gbit/sec, and make a ring
topology out of them, or using a PCIe switch. Another interesting approach
could have been a usb 3 fabric.

~~~
jcastro
Yeah these aren't really intended for real workloads, it's to spin up a team
of people with a self contained box that replicates what a real OpenStack
deployment would look like.

So the idea there is you play with this is two days of training and then two
weeks for your team to learn OpenStack while you're getting the real hardware
ready, etc.

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foxpc
The name is somewhat unlucky as The Orange Box[1] already exists.

1\.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Orange_Box](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Orange_Box)

~~~
dustinkirkland
Indeed! It's a bit of an homage to one of the greatest video games of all
time, applying it literally to our own bright orange cloud kit in a box ;-)

~~~
astrowilliam
Does it come with a free crowbar?

~~~
wmf
No, Crowbar is from Dell. Ubuntu uses MaaS. :-)

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tzabal
Very nice. I like the idea of this "HDK" as the post mentions. It would be
useful in case that you want to conduct an experiment and use this HDK as your
platform, and provide an easy way for others to fully understand your
environment and test your results, eliminating any other factors. In the same
spirit, recently I found LittleFe [1]. I think it is now abandoned (based on
the fact the the copyright message is still 2012 and the latest item in news
was posted in March 2012), but it seems to be a good project.

[1] [http://littlefe.net](http://littlefe.net)

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HCIdivision17
Is there any estimate of the cost of this unit? This is the sort of thing that
would make it very easy to set up and run in an industrial facility. Normally
we don't have access to software devs, but could really use a solid hackable
platform for process analysis. Having a single unit by a brand name would make
requsitioning a system far easier from a Purchasing standpoint.

~~~
popey
You can buy them direct from the manufacturer, Tranquil PC.
[http://www.tranquilpcshop.co.uk/ubuntu-orange-
box/](http://www.tranquilpcshop.co.uk/ubuntu-orange-box/) £7,575.00 is the
base price.

~~~
HCIdivision17
Ah, thanks! I feel a little silly having overlooked that link. Pretty nice,
considering the minimal cooling needs and raw power. I feel like this is
exactly the sort of rugged, simplified system needed for use in a plant.

~~~
iamtew
We use Poweredge VRTX systems in our branch offices to run minor stuff. It's
not too pricey compared to this Orange Box and it's an easy way to replace
what in some cases could be almost a full cabinet of systems in to 5U space.

[http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/poweredge-
vrtx/pd](http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/poweredge-vrtx/pd)

Edit: Oh yeah and it supports ECC memory, to address the comments here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7740087](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7740087)

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mey
Is there a similar designed solution that combines say 10 cheaper SOC
(raspberry pi's?) and a 100mb network?

I would love to play with clustering setups at home, but almost ~$13k USD is
way over my hobby budget. My only option currently is really visualization for
learning.

~~~
jcastro
Check out the Banana Pi's:
[http://www.bananapi.org/#about](http://www.bananapi.org/#about)

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opendais
Does anyone else wish they had doubled the number of drives and used RAID?

10 nodes @ 1 disk per node = 1 drive loss kills the node

It seems you can only buy 'extra' disks for 4 of the 10 nodes, which makes
disk redundancy across all nodes impossible.

~~~
niemeyer
These boxes were created mainly for development, experimentation, and
mobility. More disks would mean more heat, cost, size, weight.

~~~
opendais
Fair enough. :)

I suppose I just think its neat and a production-ready version would be nice.

~~~
jcastro
Get a few of them and use Ceph. :)

No quite what you want, but it'll do the job.

~~~
opendais
If only my hobby budget could afford two of them :(

~~~
tacticus
You could run ceph within the cluster of 10. It is certainly enough to run a
small cluster

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shock
I wish I had this 5 years ago when I was building a dev cluster.

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addandsubtract
Reminds me of the Protonet[1] box.

[1] [https://protonet.info/en/product/](https://protonet.info/en/product/)

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anxman
Am I the only one who thought this was going to be a Half Life 3 announcement?

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le_meta
Finally, I always wanted a botnet and spaceheater in one. Sure, this is about
10 times what the actual value is, but no price is too great to pay for
Freedom.

