Sun Boxes Up the Data Center

Have data center, will travel. Sun recently announced their portable data center initiative, though it is not yet available. The "Project Blackbox" , a 20-by-8-by-8-foot shipping container, "holds 120 Sun Fire T2000 or 240 Sun Fire T1000 servers, or about 250 AMD Opteron-based "Galaxy" systems. In addition, a storage-focused container can provide up to 2 petabytes of storage, said Sun Chief Marketing Officer and Executive Vice President Anil Gadre. A container also can offer up to 15TB of memory. The compact design's floor space is about one-third the size of a traditional 10,000-square-foot data center; saves up to 20 percent in power and cooling costs; and can be deployed about 10 times faster, sometimes in a matter of weeks. "Basically, it rolls up to you, you hook up your power, you hook up your water, you hook up your network and you're ready to go," Gadre said."