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Sun moves datacentre into a shipping container
Sun Microsystems on Tuesday plans to unveil a datacentre that's housed in a standard shipping container. Codenamed "Black Box", the idea is to drop off the appliance at a customer site where it is hooked up to electricity and a water line to provide for cooling and then its ready to go.
The term black box is commonly used to describe a device of which the inner workings are unknown to the end user. They only provide input and receive output.
Sun's container will still allow enterprises to open the doors and unscrew the servers inside, but the general idea is to provide a system that requires hardly any configuration and will provide compute power the moment it arrives. Sun claims that the device will cut set-up times by up to 90 per cent.
The Black Box therefore comes in a storage (up to , web server and high performance computing model. Such applications require monolithic hardware configurations and are generally very straightforward to use.
The systems might be conveniently modular, but will companies really replace their expensive data centres with cheaper Sun containers?
Sun is suggesting that enterprises might put some of these units in their parking lots, inside a warehouse or even on top of their Manhattan high rises.
But isn't that a security problem waiting to happen? Brazen criminals could come and pick up one of the containers on a weekend – just rent a helicopter for the Manhattan models.
Nonetheless, Sun could be on to something. Companies that shy away from outsourcing and public grid services might still be interested in a systems that provides compute power as a service.
Plenty of enterprises have emergency power generators because they don't want to rely on public utilities. But that doesn't mean that they are in the power generating business.
Enterprises today are in the compute power generating business, even though there is no logical explanation for it. We just have to find the proper device that convinces them to replace their datacentres with a container-like appliance.
technorati tags: sun+microsystems, sun, black, box, shipping+container, schwartz, project+blackbox, blackbox
October 17, 2006 at 05:18 AM | Permalink
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