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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."
On the other hand, anyone with a semi-tractor and a cable cutter could steal your entire data center...
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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The BlackBox is built with its dimensions in the ratio 1:4:9, and when touched emits a strong radio signal back to its creators.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Not too long ago my employer went from hosting the datacenter on-site to co-locating @ HP's data center in Colorado Springs.
It seems to me that Blackbox would be a boon for companies like HP. Companies can start with whatever IT infrastructure they need, be it a Blackbox or some organic collection of UNIX and Wintel stuff. When they've grown to the point that in-house IT infrastructure management costs more than it's worth*, HP trucks in a Blackbox. The client company moves data and does a test switchover. Then the HP Blackbox gets moved to the local datacenter and the real switchover occurs.
*There are days when I question if IT infrastructure management ever costs more than it's worth, but it's at least useful to recognize the reality that some CxO will draw that line in the sand...