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No space for a data center? No problem, says Sun Microsystems. The
server vendor on Tuesday showed off a "data center in a box," a new
product line for the company that packs a conventional shipping
container with storage, networking gear, and as many as 250 servers to
provide instant computing power or create an alternative for data
center expansion where space and power is limited.
No space for a data center? No problem, says Sun Microsystems. The
server vendor on Tuesday showed off a "data center in a box," a new
product line for the company that packs a conventional shipping
container with storage, networking gear, and as many as 250 servers to
provide instant computing power or create an alternative for data
center expansion where space and power is limited.
Sun says it can offer highly-dense installations of servers or
storage inside the 20-foot-by-8-foot-by-8-foot metal containers. Sun
can create installations that are 20% more energy efficient than a
traditional data center, in a third the space and at a fifth the cost,
and have the equipment operating 10 times faster, says Anil Gadre,
chief marketing officer.
"This is ready-to-go infrastructure," Gadre says. "What is pushing us
in this direction is that space and cooling issues have suddenly become
paramount."
Gadre says Sun can put about 250 of its x86-based Galaxy
servers or UltraSparc T1-based servers inside a single container, or
more than 1.4 petabytes of storage. Designed for maximum density, the
equipment inside the container is surrounded by a water-chilled cooling
system.
The data centers can be quickly deployed in business parking
lots, or even dropped by helicopter on the top of high-rise building,
Gadre says. The containers have shock absorption for easy transport,
and have integrated networking and power distribution in addition to
centralized cooling.
Sun believes the approach will appeal to companies in
"hypergrowth" modes that will use the data center containers to gain
additional capacity within weeks or days, and to companies that have
little room for expansion or have a limited ability to increase power
coming into a facility.
The effort known as Project Blackbox is aimed at Web-based
companies and high-performance computing installations. Other
applications could include military, oil exploration, and for
deployments in developing regions.
"I heard a cute e-mail over the weekend that noted it takes
longer to build a traditional data center from scratch than it took to
create YouTube and sell it to Google for $1.6 billion," Gadre says.
"Our end game is to provide preconfigured infrastructure."
Sun says it will start taking orders this week, and that it
would take several weeks or more to build and deliver the instant data
center. It wouldn't discuss prices. In the mean time, Sun plans to
spend the next six months talking to potential customers to see if it
can build standardized offerings. If Sun can create standard
installations that meet the requirements of a significant number of
potential customers there will be improvements in both cost and in
terms of how long it takes to create a deployable container.
The more custom the design, the longer it would take to get the
container filled and shipped, Gadre says. Sun says it could place
non-Sun gear inside the containers. The data center containers could
eventually be sold by third parties, including businesses that
traditional have sold modular office buildings, he says.
Read the original article: http://www.informationweek.com/hardware/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=193303264&subSection=Telecom
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