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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."
Project Blackbox is one incredibly cool device. Sun was gracious enough to park one as a demo at my company, and it's just a very well engineered, game-changing design. The beauty is that it can be done relatively cheap, because shipping containers are CHEAP in the US. Most of them come from China, and since we import more than we export, we're stuck with a boatload (literally) of excess containers.
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Imagine - rather than spending many millions building a true data center, you can just purchase a (relatively) cheap warehouse and line these things up inside. Instant data center - with lots of inherent redundancy.
Mirror one Blackbox to another across the warehouse.
Disaster Recovery? This the best thing since sliced bread. Park one at another facility 50 miles away and off you go.
I'm highly impressed. It's a bit cramped in there, but if you do your work neatly and place the servers in the racks correctly, it's not an issue. One shouldn't spend much time in the data center anyway!
and I asked
#1 - yes, they are standard racks, so other vendors' equipment will fit.
#2 - I asked about "oversized" equipment (such as Superdomes, E25k's, disk arrays, etc.) - they're working on a solution for that too. My guess is that it would involve removing some of the racks to make room.
I think Blackbox is a great idea with lots of deployment potential. Another thing to note - I was told that the air filters are designed to filter out lots of particulate matter -- sand included. You can guess why.
for Sun (Whose name came from where their first machines were seen, the Stanford University Network) to deploy their first of a new idea.
:)
I'm not sure it's the world-killer that everyone wants to think, mind: If your data center is tapped out for power or cooling, you'll still need to get portable power and cooling to go next to your portable data center, but it does seem to be an excellent idea to tide you over until your real data center expansion gets built. Which means I expect to see a number of these sitting outside fixed data center locations in a basically permanent role, just like the "temporary" trailer classroom buildings outside schools and all the other stop-gap measures we implement "just to tide us over" that wind up being permanent emplacements.
I kinda fear this outside our data center. Especially when the machines therein get on the "long in the tooth" side, and we've decommissioned every application in the thing but one.
It's a great new idea, don't get me wrong, but the problem is how most companies want to run their data centers doesn't look a whole lot like how anybody's actually doing so in the real world.
Sun can :e /1183
https://photos.sun.com/asset/7557?returnPage=/pag
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