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Think enterprise datacenters and what comes to mind is large dedicated
facilities hosting heavy racks of servers, cable spaghetti with complex cooling
systems. But systems and server solutions provider, Sun Microsystems is
currently testing a prototype of a 'portable datacenter' that is housed in a
shipping container.
Dubbed 'Project Blackbox', Sun feels that this revolutionary product
could translate into huge savings for enterprises.
Elaborating on the initiative Bjorn Andersson, Director-High Performance
Computing (HPC) and Integrated Systems, Sun Microsystems, said, “Blackbox is a
shipping container in which we have put the datacenter. This makes the
datacenter mobile. You don't need to go around building datacenters anymore!”
Sun has included everything like air conditioning, cabling, power within
the box. “You just have to hook up the system next to your car park,” said
Simon See, Director-Systems Practice, Advanced Computing Solution, Sun
Microsystems.
The Blackbox is a standard 20 ft container that can fit in eight racks of
around 250 systems. “If we were to equip it fully today and run a benchmark on
it, it would be in the top 500 HPC installation list,” claimed Andersson.
The company is now working with pilot customers to bring it out to market. It
should be available in volume shipment globally by middle of 2007.
On the cost savings of this mobile datacenter, Andersson informed, “We have
done some cost comparisons and also taken into consideration the cost of
building a datacenter. If you look at it that way, this is just one percent of
the overall cost of building a datacenter.”
This may seem a little hard to believe but the company is confident about
this concept. In October, Jonathan Schwartz, CEO and President, Sun
Microsystems, made a statement on Project Blackbox. “Rather than trying to
improve upon today's datacenter, designed for people babysitting
computers, Project Blackbox starts from the world's most broadly adopted
industry standard, the shipping container, and asks-how can we most
efficiently create modular, lights-out datacenters from this base? The answer
with one-hundredth of the initial cost, one-fifth the cost per sq ft and with 20
percent more power efficiency, we can deliver an immense multiple of capacity
and capability, anywhere on earth.” Page(s) 1
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