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Stanford Gets First Sun Blackbox

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the park-plug-and-play dept.

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."

2 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. Very impressive device by nbvb · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    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.

  2. Re:the obligatory... by Yvanhoe · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Sun can :
    https://photos.sun.com/asset/7557?returnPage=/page /1183

    --
    The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.