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Comment by sparkiegeek | Hacker News Reader

Along with Juju, this is a key technology which (literally) powers the Ubuntu Orange Box - http://www.ubuntu.com/cluster‎

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I wonder why they chose to use Intel NUC for this. It has dire price/performance. I built a cluster (see http://rwmj.wordpress.com/?s=cluster) recently, and I used AMD hardware for it because (as of right now) the performance is unbeatable for the price. I have a 32 core cluster that cost me £1300 including everything except a metal box to put it in.

Portability; from looking at your site you're using a standard ATX motherboard. The Orange Box is for demoing MAAS/OpenStack and needs to be portable enough to go on a plane.

Cool cluster btw, it'd be neat to see you blog about using MAAS on it.

That's pretty cool. One of the goals for the orangebox was being robust and compact enough to throw in a suitcase and fly to a conference. The nucs win on compactness, and also via intel's vpro/amt can do remote power management (ie. ipmi light).

Nice -- didn't know that Intel now had a serious remote management offering. These AMD mobos do wake-on-LAN, and that's it. They don't even have serial BIOS.

To be honest, Intel's AMT is a bit of a PITA, but the Orange Boxes were assembled to have some resemblance to real racks of hardware. So remote out of band power control is essential.

There's something quite magical about using Juju and MAAS on the Orange Boxes and seeing the LEDs light up as you scale out a service (e.g. juju add-unit -n 5 nova-compute).

Don't even have? Apart from Soekris and boards that can use Corerboot, what x86 board does?

I've just thrown away a 2007-era SuperMicro single U machine with serial BIOS.

Nice to know that there are more machines like this.

Every single Supermicro and Tyan board I've ever used. Also every Dell, HP, and Sun/Oracle server I've ever used (though those can be a bit more of a pain). Really, anything with a halfway-decent IPMI implementation.

We might be talking about different things. Soekris does this without IPMI.

The IPMI spec lets you send the entire console (BIOS through login boot cycle) out either the hardware serial port, or over a LAN for all those platforms.

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