Rackable Makes the Data Centre Mobile

April 5, 2007: Following Sun’s Blackbox, Data centre specialist Rackable is showing off its latest modular “containerised” data centre, emphasizing mobility, extreme density and low power costs.

Called Concentro, the company says the self-contained and fully potable data centre has already found a home with an unnamed internet company.

Designed to augment or replace traditional data centres of any size, Concentro boasts up to 9,600 processing cores in a shipping container. Not only that, the company claims that the box can house up to 1,200 rack-mount DC powered servers or up to 3.5 petabytes of storage, all while cutting cooling and air handler power costs by up to 80 percent compared to traditional data centre environments

According to Rackable, the need to reduce energy consumption and space requirements is changing the look and feel of IT environments. It says traditional brick-and-mortar data centres lack the flexibility and infrastructure to meet the growth of computing and storage resources, while the skyrocketing cost of power further compounds the issue.

The company says that the ability to deploy a Concentro system quickly, and in any location can ensure redundancy and business continuity, allowing for easy hardware migration and an expedited disaster recovery processes. This approach also eliminates the space and power problems that accompany data centre expansion.

The first Concentro has been snapped up, Rackable has not as yet announced pricing.

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