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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 Microsystems with Project Blackbox.
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 Microsystems with Project Blackbox.
At a launch event in San Francisco today, alongside various server and
storage announcements, Sun will unveil Blackbox, which is a new product
offering for the company, yet one that is a logical extension of the
integration and pre-configuration work that system makers like Sun have
been delivering for years.
A decade ago, custom configured servers were considered to be a major
advantage. But server customization didn't really solve systems
integration problems--it made them more complex. After getting what
they wanted for so many years, companies have decided that less is
more, and that what they really want are stock configurations. And
today, most vendors offer standard configurations in small, medium,
large, and extra large sizes, with more processing, memory, and disk
capacity as size increases.
This greatly simplifies server ordering, but it only solves one aspect
of the integration problem. So all of the major server vendors that do
heavy volumes with big businesses have long since created
pre-configured racks of servers, which can include rack-mounted as well
as blade servers (the terms are not mutually exclusive), storage
arrays, and switching gear. These are called "bright clusters" in the
supercomputer industry, but the concept is applicable to commercial
servers as well. With Blackbox, Sun is taking integration beyond the
sides of a server rack to the walls of the data center.
"With Blackbox, you feed it, chill it with water, and it just does
stuff for you," explains Anil Gadre, Sun's chief marketing officer.
Blackboxes will be on sale starting today, but Gadre says that the
final products are not expected to be generally available in the summer
of 2007. To create a Blackbox, Sun will pack a baby data center into an
industry-standard, 20-foot cargo shipping container that has been
painted black and emblazoned with the Sun logo. These are the
containers that trucks haul around on the highways of the world and
that ships move across the oceans.
There will be different Blackbox flavors for various kinds of computing
and storage, but the idea, according to Gadre, is that companies just
plug these black containers with the Sun logo on them into their
networks, into their electricity, and into the water-cooling facilities
of their data centers and treat them like "black boxes." Sun is not
referring to the black boxes that are in aircraft and recovered after
crashes (not a good image for a data center), but rather the
engineering usage of the phrase black box, which means a sealed device
that performs some function and about which you know nothing about the
insides and--here's the important bit--you just don't care, either,
because it just works.
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In a conference call pre-announcing Blackbox to the press, Gadre
recounted a wisecrack that Dave Douglas, one of the engineers on the
project, quipped: 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. And that means
companies have a tough time building out their data centers to match
the growth of their business.
The initial Blackboxes will be aimed at companies deploying Web
infrastructure or high performance computing workloads. Sun has a few
initial configurations it has put together. The first consists of a
cargo container that has been tricked out with special cooling
facilities that can house either 120 of Sun's T2000 or 240 of its T1000
"Niagara" servers. The former is a 2U rack-mounted box, while the
latter is a 1U box; both use the multi-cored Sparc T1 processors and
can run either Solaris 10 or Linux. Another configuration will house
240 of Sun's "Galaxy" Opteron-based servers, sporting 7 TB of main
memory and 480 dual-core Opteron 2000 series processors. That would be
just under 5 teraflops of peak theoretical number-crunching
performance. Using its "Thumper" Sun Fire X4500 data servers, a
Blackbox could be equipped with 1.4 petabytes of disk storage. Sun is
also saying that it will deliver a Blackbox setup that can drive
between 23,000 and 30,000 Sun Ray thin clients and between 10,000 and
13,000 active end users. Sun is not going to mix the contents inside of
a Blackbox. You pick one and that is what you get. Only by minimizing
customization can Sun get economies of scale and, therefore, make a
buck.
Aside from having the virtue of speed--Gadre hopes that Sun will be
able to build a Blackbox and ship it in a matter of weeks, ready to
roll, so to speak--Blackboxes have the virtue of density. Because Sun
is using water cooling, and actually employing the sides of the
container to draw heat out of the data center inside, it can cram the
components a lot more tightly than it could in an air-cooled data
center. Gadre estimates that across various storage and server
scenarios, a Blackbox can deliver the computing capability that
requires about 10,000 square feet of data center space--and do so using
about a third of the space, at about one-fifth of the cost (including
building facilities), and save about 20 percent on power and cooling.
One of the reasons Blackbox works is that air is a terrible conductor
of heat. But once you adopt water-cooling for the server racks and make
use of the container itself as a heat absorber that interfaces to water
chilling plants--the same kinds that data centers use to make
conditioned air--you can really pack the IT equipment into a smaller
space.
Sun is not exactly sure how customers will deploy Blackboxes, but Gadre
says that they could be left in a parking lot or stuffed into a secure
warehouse if data center security is an issue. What he didn't say, and
what is obvious, is that you could build a secure garage of sorts
housing multiple units and make that your data center. Because the baby
data centers are in cargo containers, they can be stacked, too, so the
data center can go vertical--which you cannot do in a data center so
easily today. The Blackbox unit has obvious applications for the
military and for non-military government operations where emergency
computing capacity has to be deployed. It is not hard to envision a
disaster recovery business based on portable data centers using
Blackboxes. (This idea is not new, by the way. European companies were
driving baby data centers around on lorries and renting them out to
companies experiencing outages in the 1980s.) In keeping with its green
theme, Sun also foresees companies plunking down lots of Blackboxes
next to an electric generating plant. Sun will itself use Blackboxes to
build out its Sun Grid utility computing farm.
The Blackbox container has been tricked out with a sensor array,
alarms, and a global positioning system, and while it is not made to be
moved around frequently, it is equipped with shock absorbers that allow
a truck to move it around. The unit has front and rear doors and a
central aisle on the inside to service the gear. Sun has even tried to
patent some of the cooling tricks it created for the container.
Sun has not figured out prices for Blackboxes yet. And you can bet it
will try to charge a slight premium for the computing. But probably not
a big premium. "Containers are a commodity, and what goes inside a
Blackbox is our standard gear. So we're not planning to make this
onerous," explained Gadre. Assuming an average price of $5,500 for a
configured Galaxy server, that comes to $1.32 million for the servers
inside a single Blackbox--not including racks, networking, power and
cooling, and such. It is safe to say that it will be a couple million
dollars to get a Blackbox. But, given the grief of integration and the
benefits of mobility, density, and efficiency, there is no question
that some companies are going to give this Blackbox idea a spin.
Read the original article: http://www.itjungle.com/breaking/bn101706-story02.html
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