The Orange Box: Cloud for the Free Man | Hacker News Reader

The Orange Box: Cloud for the Free Man

blog.dustinkirkland.com

90 pointsjcastro27 comments

So, I wouldn't use this box because it doesn't 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). 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...) 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.

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.

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

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Orange_Box

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 ;-)

Does it come with a free crowbar?

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

Given the use of that name and "Free Man" in the title, I suspect they're already aware of it and that it's an intentional reference.

I thought it was on purpose, esp. with the main character of the main game is 'Freeman'

Either by coincidence or by a very elaborate troll, the trash boxes in Berlin are also officially called "Orange Box":

http://bilder.t-online.de/b/46/06/03/00/id_46060300/tid_da/i...

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Check out the Banana Pi's: http://www.bananapi.org/#about

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.

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

Fair enough. :)

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

Get a few of them and use Ceph. :)

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

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

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

Well - RAID is more or a traditional architecture solution than a cloud one. A cloud storage solution like Ceph provides redundancy across nodes, and I've even read that they strongly discourage the use of RAID. Still, the orange box is a homogenous architecture that can be used flexibly as a training and introduction tool - I've not heard anyone suggest you run it as your production cloud. If you go and spec a real cloud you'll find vendors will provide different configuration for designated storage and compute nodes.

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

Reminds me of the Protonet[1] box.

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

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

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com