Sun To Unveil Project Blackbox

this great guy writes "A year ago, Google's secret plans for a portable data center in a shipping container were being revealed by Robert X. Cringely. Sun Microsystems is about to officially unveil its 'data center in a box' concept. Project Blackbox will involve the full-scale production of data centers in 20-foot-long cargo shipping containers." From the article: "The idea eliminates several major hurdles facing data center customers: finding an appropriate site, arranging the servers and cooling mechanisms in the most efficient manner, and waiting for construction to be complete. The company is touting energy efficiency as a crucial benefit of the confined space, as its patented cooling features can more accurately target hot spots than in giant warehouses. The box can hold hundreds of servers and save thousands of dollars per year in energy costs, the company said."

Comments

Re:I have a Vision

[networkBoy]

Latency.
If you're main datacenter is in The Planet down in Tx and you want a presence in the EU without the cost of a datacenter you can drop one of these off at the local telco peering point and wham! instant local presence. Later when traffic dictates you could consider upgrading to a full datacenter.

On a completely tangental note:
Beowulf cluster anyone?
-nB

Security?

[Salvance]

I'm sure Sun has thought about it, but there has to be some security concerns with housing your data center in an easily transportable cargo container. Their example of using the containers for a growing company like YouTube instantly reduced my "who would ever want this other than the military" skepticism.

Talk about industrial espionage and theft opportunities though:
"Hey buddy, what's that on the back of your truck?"
"It's YouTube, I just picked it up out of a parking lot down the street"
"Cool, I was just looking around for a container of MySpace myself"

Re:Security?

[aaarrrgggh]

There are a couple good tricks for protecting them, stacking them like you would in a cargo facility is the first to come to mind, but Jersy Barriers on all sides would also complicate matters pretty well. Sandbagging the roof would also make it more work to get it out.

If all else fails, make a stand that they lock into on the parking lot. Those containers really are built for security and durability.

Re:I have a Vision

[Kjella]

Why? Why would you give this any less security then a normal data center?

Is a laptop easier to steal than the old desktop chained to your desk? Yes. It's not so much about giving it less security, it's that a mobile unit is inherently a lot easier to steal than a fixed installation. I imagine time would be of essence as most companies that need a datacenter would notice quite quickly that it was missing. Cut the alarms, break up the locks, hook up the truck and when you're ready to go the whole datacenter is rolling before you know what hit you as opposed to start tearing down server racks. I suppose you could fix this by locking it down until you have a permanent installation, but then most of the point seems lost to me. If you're doing a once-over job on cooling and organizing then traditional datacenters do just fine. Stuff I see this as useful for is the type "Yes, I know we're moving next year when the new site is done, but we need more capacity now. Find me a cheap way to deploy it now but move it next year." That sort of implies you won't be embedding it in concrete any time soon.

Re:I have a Vision

[auric_dude]

If you think about what happened when Katrina struck these black boxes might have helped both local and federal authorites if they had them, had plans to use them and they indeed worked as advertised; other problems came to light http://www.defensetech.org/archives/002715.html in the areas of systems speaking to systems and a severe lack of bandwidth that might have not allowed the box/boxes to function as expected.

CEO Blogs are so boring and predictable

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm glad someone else picked up on the fact that Jon Schwartz blog about the 'death of the monolithic datacenter' came one week before a new product announcement by Sun, about portable, small-scale datacenters.

I knew as soon as I read about his blog post, last week on slashdot, that his 'visionary musings' were just paving the way for some new product annoucement by Sun. I mean, the CEO of a company whose CORE BUSINESS is datacenters, isn't going to announce the death of the datacenter, unless his company is about to release some new technology solution that is competing with the traditional datacenter.

Talk about predictable. I don't know why people bother to read corporate blogs, especially by veeps and CEO's - they only exist as a marketting tool. CEO blogs are the new press-release, but in a first person perspective.

Re:Open Computing Environment

[Doc Ruby]

I didn't say the solar input area was limited to the surface of one side, like its roof. Nor did I say the containers would be closely packed - rather, the only deployment I suggested was at sea, with lots of area per container.

Besides, there is actually lots of incident solar power. Even just the roof of a floating container is 8'x40' = 320ft^2 = 30m^2. Insolation in the tropics is about 1KW:m^2 at noon, probably about 400W:m^2 considering nights and weather. So each container gets over 10KW. Even 15% efficient PV means over 1.7KW. And again, that's just using the area of the roof, rather than a design using more of the surrounding space.

1.7KW+ is a lot more than PCs, especially if they're designed for low power consumption - natural cooling can help a lot. And again, if the design uses more of the surrounding space, even at lower efficiency, there's 180-725KW incoming within a containerlength or two. A pod of these containers sucking all the solar at 10% scattered just a few lengths apart can deliver 70KW to 100W computing units, or 700 units. That's about 10 units per cubic meter, which seems about right to accommodate pipes for ambient cooling. Without AC/DC losses, fans, or rotating discs (FlashRAM instead), and maybe Transmeta-style (or mobile Cells) CPUs, 100W starts to look like quite a lot. Enough to accommodate losses from generating/consuming fuelcell cycles to ensure continuous power.