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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."
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
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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"
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