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.