This actually looks like a pretty interesting idea. "Turnkey private cloud" might be attractive. Especially if they sell the Open Source/we teach you/you're independent part well.
Could potentially sell like hotcakes in Europe if they play the NSA-angle.
I can also envision a very sweet secondary market (partner with an open source ERP for example)
Even before the NSA scandal, it struck me as surprising that you don't see Linux distributions actively marketing "open, auditable, buildable" and the related services of training for software auditing.
"Canonical engineers will deliver an Orange Box to your office, that is yours for two weeks for $10,000 plus travel and accommodation"
This statement had me thinking... weird, ok, what's the Orange Box, but then it got even stranger below... the orange box is a "complete mobile cluster and an easy, low-risk way to deploy OpenStack cloud infrastructure on your premises".
If it's cloud, why do I need it on my premises? Isn't the whole point that it exists... you know... in the cloud??
Cloud technology, specifically abstracting away physical machines and storage locations and allowing applications to gracefully scale their resource demand up and down based on rules and monitoring are useful to any large IT shop, regardless of the location or ownership of the datacenter.
Further, many institutions and corporations are organized in such a way that they function as a number of smaller groups contracting resources from a central IT provider, and in this configuration, a private cloud can be an immensely useful way to divvy up resources without having to work out down to the physical machine who owns what.
I'm assuming this is targeted at organizations wanting to run their own private cloud, not the typical small startup that consumes cloud resources from a player like Amazon, Google or Microsoft.
I don't have a clear picture what all can be deployed on this... thing. Obviously the basics of a webserver, database, docker containers, etc., but this isn't where the value is.
It appears to have a wifi antenna— can it manage a corporate wifi deployment, with RADIUS or whatever? What about LDAP? Samba shares?
Can it supply an email/webmail service which I won't have to spend all day setting up?
For the stuff configured through these fancy visual tools, I assume there's a sane and secure way to back up my config and data offsite, and do a quick restore in case of failure/loss of the hardware.
The Thing is not for production deployment, it's for training. It's a bunch of compute nodes in a nice roadcase, so that you can experiment in an environment that is:
- clean
- does not require rackspace in your datacenter
- does not require your IT group to deploy it
- does not take up machines that your QA group wanted to use
- and is a known hardware, network and OS configuration so that the documentation is useful.
When you want to set up for sandbox/alpha/qa/beta/prod, you go through your IT or cloud procedures first.
Could potentially sell like hotcakes in Europe if they play the NSA-angle.
I can also envision a very sweet secondary market (partner with an open source ERP for example)