Trailer Parks go Modern with the Canned Datacentre
Trailer Parks go Modern with the Canned Datacentre
December 18, 2007: Not many shipping containers are honoured with a world tour. But one black can, decked out with a virtualised data centre, has taken up residence on a prime harbour side location in Sydney.
It’s crossed oceans on a ship, flown on a 747 and travelled the streets of cities on the back of a truck. Now sitting comfortably by the water of Sydney’s Darling Harbour, the 20 foot compacted innovation from Sun Microsystems is gaining the attention of tourists, passer-by’s and organisations serious about cramming additional IT capacity into a neat steal frame.
Announced in October last year, ‘Project BlackBox’ layers a compute density of up to 1250W per square foot into a moveable shipping container intelligently designed to pack racks tighter than possible in a typical datacentre. Equipped with shock absorption for safe transport, the can is designed to meet sudden needs for increased capacity, swift field deployments, disaster recovery and IT needs requiring changing locations.
“This can be deployed in the tenth of the time it takes to deploy a data centre. One customer has actually managed to do it in 22 days,” says Cheryl Martin Director of Project Blackbox who is currently travelling the World with the prototype.
For Sun Microsystem engineers, the concept for the design did not originate from finding a way to cram a configurable IT environment into a data centre, but rather the need to find answers to increasing capacity problems. “We have a huge focus on innovation and have been doing a lot of work to figure out how we can increase IT capacity,” says Marin.
The potential scenarios for Blackbox could well change the nature of IT capacities in even the remotest regions of the world. Besides providing an alternative for migrating or expanding and consolidating the typical datacentre capacity, the can could also be dragged around for disaster recovery, in the event of humanitarian relief, on an oil rig, in a War Zone, or even by a hosting company one day offering their own trailer park of sorts, where Blackboxes can be parked in ports to have the necessary chilled water, power and networking needs supplied.
Duncan Bennet, acting managing director for Sun Microsystems Australia and New Zealand pictures the Blackbox in Australia to find a home in remote areas and in companies that have simply run out of space. “Web 2.0 companies could also be interested, especially where capacity has gone from very little to a lot in a matter of months,” he says.
Not surprisingly, the Blackbox option is not for the faint hearted. Sitting somewhere around the $700,000 mark, safe transport will no doubt cause some headaches as the precious cans in transit await collection at an airport, a wharf, or even off the back of a truck.
And don’t like the colour black? It’s optional; the 12 units already shipped are actually painted white.