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Stanford Gets First Sun Blackbox
miller60 writes "The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) will be the first end-user to get a Project Blackbox portable data center from Sun Microsystems. The 20-foot shipping container (which will be white, not black) will sit on a concrete pad behind the computer building with hookups to power, a 10-gigabit network connection and a chiller located on an adjacent pad. The 'data center in a box' will allow the SLAC to expand its computing capacity even though its existing data center has maxed out its power and cooling."
It's got an integrated GPS and alarming system. If it moves, pagers all over the place go off. Gotta love cellular technology!
I was a bit surprised that all the pictures only show off the outside and none of the links follow to info on what these things look like on the inside or how they work.
Here is Sun's page that shows off considerably more info: Sun's Project Black Box page
Basically the outside of the box has hookups for power, cooling water, and network. Everything on the inside is pre-wired. Servers aren't included, but they are designed to serve as the transport container for the servers -- not just a place to put servers once the box arrives (the racks have a shock-absorbing suspension system so that servers can be transported in the container without the need to unrack them or pack them for shipping.). When it arrives it just needs to be "plugged in" and it's literally ready to go. Since it really is a standard shipping container, all rules about shipping containers apply -- e.g. there's no shortage of trucks, trains, or boats designed specifically to hold them. They are structurally sturdy and can be stacked tall just like containers on a cargo ship.
I had the pleasure of getting to see and work with the demo unit that Sun had/has on tour. The inside of the unit has two rows of their custom built racks, three racks deep on both sides of the "black box". Each rack has a water cooling unit between it and the next rack in the row so that the hot air comming out of the front rack is cooled before it is used as the intake air for the following rack. The racks themselves are on a custom designed damping/shock absorption system and rail system so that when you need to work on a rack, it can be slid out into the center aisle where you can then access the front and back of the rack. A little planning is needed so that you have the appropriate tools/gear on the proper side of the rack before you pull it out into the center asile, however they do slide very easily even when loaded up so you can put is back in and move behind it or in front of it depending on what you need to do. It makes the most sense to have two people, one on either side do and work on the systems.
It may be a little warm in there if you place it out in the middle of nowhere as the cooling system is really designed just to cool the systems in racks, and not the entire box, especially when you have the front or back doors open, and you may want to close the inner door if you can to keep try and keep the moist outside air from entering the container, however there is a dehumidifier in the system to take care of that situation. It will be a little cramped working in there, but no more so then any high density compute server room. The main idea however is to not have to go in there very often, in which the Sun "lights out managment" systems come into play. The only reason to go into the container is for actual hardware failure, all other maintenace can be performed remotely on systems with the "lom" ports, from bios settings, to single user/maintenance mode issues.
As for your "I know that node failures happen on a very regular basis with clusters...", comment, I have personally found that if you are using "lom", you will almost never need to go in there unless it was a true hardware issue. In the 9 racks of beowulf cluster that I manage, there have only been 6 actual hardware outages over the last 3 years. The majority of issues are software related outages which can all be fixed over the "lom" connections, even reloading the OS...
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
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http://static.flickr.com/118/272590930_c8c7f47bca
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http://static.flickr.com/35/272588650_f211dd9803_
this was at the menlo park unveiling, a few months ago, for employees and press.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
The thing has a built in cooling system. Supposedly it just needs a water hookup. But apparently the water has to be a certain temperature. Hence the chiller, which won't be needed until central California's August heat wave.