Submitted by “Whenever IT managers complain about their jobs, one of the things that always tops the list of their complaints is the time, money, and annoyance that comes from simply integrating the servers, storage, and networking gear they acquire. If integration is a big pain point, then so is building out data centers. In many cases, companies simply do not have the power and cooling to add more gear to their data centers without causing a meltdown. Enter Sun with Project Blackbox.”
But Sun has indeed put together something really cool here.
Not sure at all how I would have use of one of these babies, but on the other hand, I’m not managing any of the big irons out there =)
Anyway, cool idea Sun, and love to see more of these funny projects in the future =)
I can think of a couple instances where having “Blackbox” would be real handy.
1. Cold or hot stand-by for disasters
2. Deployable data centers (we deploy machines all over the world)
This just rocks!
You just fill up the tank ? Or do you need a cooldown ? Or do you attach it to the tap and the sewer ? wouldn’t that be real wasteful ?
/me wonders
You connect it to a chilled water unit.
I just saw this on the sun.com page this morning. Quite impressive. Now you can buy up undeveloped land, and stack these suckers up, and wham – huge data center space. The only expense/issue is making sure the power is available, as well as the bandwidth. I’m not sure how environmentally sealed these containers are, but most shipping containers are pretty darn sturdy.
I’m impressed. Now I’m debating about adding these to my underground facilities, as a less-expensive option for people who don’t need all the security my underground facility provides! Bravo, Sun!
I wonder what this has to do with Google
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20051117.html
“The probable answer lies in one of Google’s underground parking garages in Mountain View. There, in a secret area off-limits even to regular GoogleFolk, is a shipping container. But it isn’t just any shipping container. This shipping container is a prototype data center. Google hired a pair of very bright industrial designers to figure out how to cram the greatest number of CPUs, the most storage, memory and power support into a 20- or 40-foot box. We’re talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig. The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid.”
“It takes longer to spec out and build a data center than it took to create YouTube and sell it to Google for $1.65 billion. That’s funny, but it is also true.”
True does not equal relevant. A lot of things take longer than creating YouTube but that doesnt mean those things arent worthwhile. I’m sure it took longer for the Sun engineers to design Blackbox…
“True does not equal relevant. A lot of things take longer than creating YouTube but that doesnt mean those things arent worthwhile. I’m sure it took longer for the Sun engineers to design Blackbox”
Isn’t that the whole point? Sun designs these things so you don’t have to.
“Isn’t that the whole point? Sun designs these things so you don’t have to.”
Following their analogy they shouldnt bother designing things and instead just create a new YouTube (or similar).
Nokia have been doing similar thing. It’s a truck “container” with 3g+2g radio, nss core, packetswitched core, plus some services (like mmsc). Mobile operator, but really mobile.
Does it come in optional colors?
White is a bit cooler when exposed to direct sunlight.
Lots of links related to this box, I would of posted them directly but its larger than post limit here.
http://uadmin.blogspot.com/2006/10/black-box-links.html