Ubuntu might not have a perfect track record with hardware, but why let that stop it! Now it's decided to put the cloud in a box. A bright orange box.


This is the appropriately named Orange Box: an OpenStack cloud-in-a-case It's designed to be (kind of) portable, at just over the size of a suitcase and weighing 70 pounds with all its accessories and flight case. That means it's just light enough to be shipped as checked luggage.


Lurking inside is quite a line-up of hardware. At the heart of things are ten Intel micro-servers powered by Ivy Bridge i5-3427U CPUs, each with four cores, Intel HD Graphics 4000, 16GBs of DDR3 RAM, a 128GB SSD root disk, and a Gigabit Ethernet port. There's also a Centrino Advanced-N 6235 Wi-Fi Adapter and 2TB Western Digital hard drive.

All told, then, you have a 40-core monster with 160GB RAM and 1.2TB of SSD storage in a little box that you can take anywhere. You can then use it for, well, pretty much anything: from as an impromptu cloud server in a disaster zone, to a training system that can be taken from school to school. Or anything in between really. There is the small matter of price, though. It'll cost you $12,750. Best get saving. [Tranquility via ZDNet]