Innovation in Software

This is the coolest infrastructure project I have seen in a long, long time. Project Blackbox is Sun’s ‘data center in a shipping container’ and can come complete with two petabytes of storage, and provide enough processing power to match almost any corporate data centre I’ve ever heard of. What’s more, it’s energy-efficient, recyclable, and you can ship it to anywhere on the planet. The innovation of this thing is just… well, astonishing.

Using a standard 20-foot shipping container, what they provide is a fully racked, cabled and cooled data centre you just ship to wherever you want – basements, roof-tops, oil platforms, wherever. You hook up electric, networking and water (for cooling), and you suddenly have a completely working data centre. It has alarms, GPS tracking, and shock absorption for transportation and security. Once you’ve finished with it, you can either pick it up and ship it somewhere else, or if it has reached end of life, just ask for Sun to come and take it away for recycling and environmentally friendly disposal free of charge – a big factor now we’re in the age of the EU Waste Directive.

It can be populated with 250 Sun Fire servers configured for grid computing across seven racks inside the container, with an eighth rack containing network switches, dehumidifier, thermal management systems, alarm systems and EPO controls. Sun are keen to make things configurable though, and they suggest you could hold 120 Sun Fire T2000 systems, or 250 Sun Fire T1000 systems with 2,000 cores. They claim that 250 CoolThreads servers support four times the number of Web users and provide five times the efficiency of the same number of similarly configured Dell Xeon servers.

What’s more, they say customers will also save approximately $1,000 per CoolThreads system per year in energy costs over traditional datacenters, and customers in Northern California – which, despite being home to Silicon Valley has surprisingly few data centres – qualify for energy rebates of up to $240,000 if they upgrade from Xeon-based systems to Sun Fire CoolThreads servers in Project Blackbox.

Many years ago I used to be an engineer at an ISP that had for various reasons built its data centre in a converted cowshed in the middle of nowhere. One of my jobs each morning and each evening was to ‘sort out the cooling’. Because we had not had room to put proper aircon in and we had quite high rack density, we were wheeling around portable aircon units just to keep the temperature below 40 degrees celsius ambient and stop routers shutting down.

What I, and my colleagues, would have given for this box back then. I have been in about half a dozen data centres since, and none of them seem to be as well thought out, environmentally friendly, flexible or usable as this thing is.

The problem, of course, will be price. This box is not going to be cheap, and not surprisingly, they’ve not put up a sticker price anywhere on their dedicated website for it. I’d guess the price would be hovering around the $1 million mark, but in all honesty even if it cost twice as much it would still be arguably good value. I want one. Now. :-)