Everyone at VMworld wanted a slice of the Pi
Q: What do a desktop computer, a home weather station and an HD surveillance camera have in common?
A: They can all be powered for less than £25 with a Raspberry Pi.
Initially developed as a way to get kids involved in computer science, the Raspberry Pi has fast become the gadget of choice not only for techies, but for schools and businesses across the UK and US. The credit card sized computer has enough power to facilitate just about everything a normal computer can – word processing, games, video – all with the price tag of about £20. All you need is a keyboard, a screen and an SD memory card.
The hype surrounding Raspberry Pi's has grown over the last year, but we were overwhelmed by the phenomenal response our giveaway received at this month's VMworld event in Barcelona. We had 50 Pi's on offer for the first 50 people to successfully beat the target score on our interactive game 'Beat the Noisy Neighbours' - and the competition soon became fierce. We had players coming back to the stand up to 30 times in some cases to try and beat their score, as well as offers of bribery and even a couple of sneaky thefts when our backs were turned!
Raspberry Pi's aren't currently available in Europe, which might explain their popularity at the event – they were like gold dust. It was amazing to see people getting genuinely excited about technology again. Pi's are encouraging innovation and bringing a bit of fun back in to computing; from turning an old Kindle into a multimedia web browser, to the more complex task of creating your own Bitcoin miner, people are enjoying exploring the possibilities.
There are also huge business benefits to these powerful little machines. We have customers that power entire offices with Raspberry Pi's and make huge cost and space savings (read our case study to see how marina operator Yacht Havens uses them to lower their desktop costs). For organisations looking to reduce their hardware expenditure, Raspberry Pi's are the ideal thin-client. They pack a considerable amount of power considering their size, and for bigger projects their resource can be pooled together. We hear from a lot of businesses that are keen to move to a thin-client model; but who find that while these terminals are less expensive than desktops, they're still not cheap. As we make the move towards cloud-based services, the move to thin-clients also seems inevitable, and Raspberry Pi's are a simple way to reduce cost.
VMworld was an incredible 3 day event, buzzing with people who were truly excited about where the future of computing is heading. Our Noisy Neighbours game, based on the Noisy Neighbour issue that many face when using a multi-tenant cloud, proved popular and we were really pleased with the positive response it got. And if you were one of the lucky winners of our Raspberry Pi's then we look forward to seeing what you do with it. You can tweet us your comments and pictures at @databarracks.
You can see photos of some of our winners from VMworld here.