Canonical Announces The Orange Box $12k USD Ubuntu Cluster Suitcase

The Orange Box, which isn't to be confused with Valve's video game compilation, is a 10-node cluster computer designed by Canonical and TranquilPC for showing off Ubuntu Linux.

The Orange Box is designed to be a "spectacular development platform" for showcasing Ubuntu, MAAS, Juju, Landscape, OpenStack, Hadoop, and other technologies. Canonical's Orange Box can be a compact cloud, powerful computational machine, or a lightweight cluster.

Canonical is offering two-days of training on their cloud/server technologies plus free access to the Orange Box for two weeks, with hopes you'll be deploying more Ubuntu and Canonical's technologies within your own enterprise environment. If you wish to buy your own Orange Box, Canonical is selling it for £7,575.00... Or roughly $12,763 USD. The Ubuntu cluster is built by the UK-based TranquilPC.

Inside the "Orange Box" that's about the size of a suit-case are ten Intel Ivy Bridge NUCs, a D-Link Gigabit switch, 100-240 AC/DC power supply, and the first node also has a Centrino Advanced-N 6235 WiFi Adapter, and 2TB Western Digital HDD. Per node for the Intel NUCs is a Core i5 3427U CPU + HD Graphics 4000 + 16GB DDR3 RAM + 128GB SSD root disk + Gigabit Ethernet per node. Thus in total it comes down to a 40-core, 160GB RAM, 1.2TB SATA solid state storage, and Gigabit-backed network.

Those wishing to learn more about Canonical's Orange Box can find many details via Dustin Kirkland's blog.