SDI in a Box

There's an accurate, well-written article on geospatial open source by Christopher J. Andrews in Directions Magazine. In the last paragraph, Andrews writes.

With the liberal licensing on some geospatial OSS, I hope an industrious company will develop a 'map server in a box' appliance. Such an appliance, coupled with a basic methodology to package up an organization's available data, would greatly accelerate the adoption of geospatial OSS and further decrease the TCO for geospatial open source.

People having been talking about mapservers or spatial data infrastructures in a box for a while. It's bound to happen any day now, but almost certainly without the box, instead using "elastic" arrays of virtual machines.