Orange Box: Canonical’s New Private Cloud
Ubuntu is the most commonly utilized operating system in the public cloud. Mark Shuttleworth is the founder of Canonical which developed Ubuntu Linux. Some reports show that Ubuntu is hosted on nearly 70% of all public cloud servers. Given Ubuntu’s close relationship with the OpenStack community, it would only make sense that Canonical has decided to shift its focus on private cloud hosting.
Canonical is calling their new private cloud offering The Orange Box. In a public unveiling of the Orange Box, Shuttleworth quipped that businesses would be able to achieve “Chuck Norris Grade” private clouds in their organizations. So what exactly is Ubuntu’s Orange Box?
The private cloud offering is being dubbed MaaS. That stands for Metal as a Service. The idea behind the Orange Box is to have a plug and play on-premises cloud. A white paper published on Ubuntu.com notes that The Orange Box allows administrators to “Build a full OpenStack or Big Data Solution in minutes.” The box has two handles so it can be easily placed on a desktop or carried into a data room for a cloud solution on demand.
Technical Specifications for Ubuntu Orange Box
- 10 Nodes
- Intel i5-3427U CPU dedicated to each node
- 16GB of RAM
- 120GB Solid State Storage
- Preloaded with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS “Trusty Tahr” 64-Bit
- OpenStack, Hadoop, Cloud Foundry, Juju compatible
- 1 Year of Ubuntu Advantage Support
This cloud in a box solution is designed for ultimate portability. The Orange Box can easily be loaded into its flight case, the WiFi antenna can be detached and you also receive a power adapter that will work in different countries such as the UK, EU and IEC. A keyboard, mouse and monitors are also listed as included accessories.
Canonical and Ubuntu make it easy to begin deploying private cloud in your organization. The Orange Box is here to stay if small the medium enterprises pick up on The Orange Box’s ease of use. The Orange Box would be perfect for corporate development environments or to have on hand for disaster recovery tasks.
