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Hands-on with Canonical’s Orange Box and a peek into cloud nirvana
- trhway 12y ago20 cores i5 @ 1.8GHz , 160G RAM, 1.2T SSD for $12K. My [at a BigCo] HP workstation has 16 cores i7 @ 2.6GHz, 256G RAM, 1T SSD - about $10K. Of course it doesn't consume 320W power - its power unit is something like 1KW :) I'd wonder what is advantages of Intel NUC in such a cluster setup over say using microATX boards with 4 core i5 and 32 GB per board.
- wmf 12y agoAs the article says, the Orange Box is not about specs or price. It's a cluster in a box to demo MaaS.
- druiid 12y agoSure, but I think what the poster is trying to get at is.. why couldn't you make a configuration using the NUC's that was more than a demo environment? I don't see any reason you couldn't as long as your infrastructure doesn't care about what happens to single nodes.
- tormeh 12y agoYeah, lots of reliable services are built using cheap, unreliable parts, because it's often cheaper to have redundant nodes and replace the ones that break than to buy more reliable stuff.
- rwmj 12y agoYou are absolutely right that the Intel NUC offers terrible price-performance. I looked at the NUC before building a cluster for 1/10th the price which outperforms this: http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2014/04/28/caseless-virtualization-cluster-part-5/#content http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2014/04/28/caseless-virtualization...
- jkldotio 12y agoThe article highlights repeatedly that it's a demonstration project and only a few of these were built so raw CPU performance was likely traded off for things like size, power consumption or branding. On the non-technical level of branding it's evoking a sense of "new" rather than "commodity" by basking in the glow of the PR dollars someone else, Intel, has spent promoting NUC. Size is highly relevant to something you are taking to a customer, it was literally built to fit in a flight case for taking on a plane. The µATX you mention is sized 24cm² through to 17cm², whereas everything I can find for Intel NUC has it at 10cm² (so smaller than Mini-ITX's 17cm² and even Nano-ITX's 12cm²). Power consumption is also an issue versus your workstation, they might have had cooling issues inside a different box. Airport baggage handlers versus the heavier heatsinks on the CPUs of an µATX solution could also be a factor. If they put fewer larger boards in there it would constrain the possible demonstrations and take away from the sense of "cloud" rather than "rack". If you look at Shuttleworth's demo[1] it's fast enough to demonstrate a number of configurations in a 30 minute window. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEYCjHCderM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEYCjHCderM
- panzi 12y agoWhen I read "Orange Box" I still first think of this: http://store.steampowered.com/sub/469/ http://store.steampowered.com/sub/469/
- misframer 12y agoNo ECC RAM support. I'm guessing this isn't for "serious" use?
- dsr_ 12y agoThe article says so several times: this is demo hardware. It goes out on the road in a single case and shows you what you can do on a 10-node system. No failover power. No internal redundant networking (each node only has one NIC, and there's one switch acting as the backplane. One control master unit, specially wired up so that it can be a console. No redundant storage anywhere. Probably no clustered filesystem, though you could put one in... but not that much I/O to deal with the outside world.
- kiallmacinnes 12y agoGoogled the specs and commented without reading I see ;) No - this is not meant in any way to be production hardware. It is a portable hardware platform intended to showcase Canoicals software.
- tacticus 12y agoBlame intel. They won't allow you to put ecc on many of their chips.