Take ten high-end Intel NUCs, a gigabit Ethernet switch, a couple of terabytes of storage, and cram it all into a fancy custom enclosure. What does that spell? Orange Box.
Not the famous gaming bundle from Valve, though—this Orange Box is a sales demo tool built by Canonical. There are more than a dozen Orange Boxes in the wild right now being used as the hook to get potential Canonical users interested in trying out Metal-as-a-Service (MAAS), Juju, and other Canonical technologies. We got the chance to sit down with Canonical's Dustin Kirkland and Ameet Paranjape for an afternoon and talk about the Orange Box: what it is, what it does, and more importantly, what it is not.
First off, Canonical emphasized to Ars multiple times that it is not getting into the hardware business. If you really want to buy one of these things, you can have Tranquil PC build one for you (for £7,575, or about $12,700), but Canonical won't sell you an Orange Box for your lab—there are too many partner relationships it could jeopardize by wading into the hardware game. But what Canonical does want to do is let you fiddle with an Orange Box. It makes for an amazing demo platform—a cloud-in-a-box that Canonical can use to show off the fancy services and tools it offers.
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