|
Sun Microsystems Inc. (SUNW.O) on
Monday unveiled a portable data center housed in a standard
shipping container, an undertaking the computer maker has
dubbed "Project Blackbox," aimed at customers seeking better
efficiency.
The data center -- a collection of computer servers, data
storage equipment, network connections and software -- is
typically in a fixed location, with special cooling and power
needs.
Sun Microsystems Inc. (SUNW.O) on
Monday unveiled a portable data center housed in a standard
shipping container, an undertaking the computer maker has
dubbed "Project Blackbox," aimed at customers seeking better
efficiency.
The data center -- a collection of computer servers, data
storage equipment, network connections and software -- is
typically in a fixed location, with special cooling and power
needs.
But Project Blackbox, currently in the late prototype
phase, can be portable and would be ideal for military
applications, or for use on an oil platform to help in the
discovery of new oil fields, for example, Sun said.
The project is an extension of Sun's focus on providing
computer servers and technology that it says use far less power
than those of its rivals that use Intel Corp. chips.
Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz said that an increasing
number of its customers, such as next-generation Web services
providers, are more focused on issues of power and flexibility
than on the sheer computing power of their data centers.
"Those priorities (of its customers) are more around
environmental constraints such as their power bill, the space
density of their data center, and the price and utilization of
bandwidth," Schwartz said.
He added that Sun believes the computing facilities of the
future will be more likely to be modular and flexible. Sun said
that Project Blackbox is 20 percent more efficient and delivers
five times the capacity of today's typical data center.
Traditional data centers "take a long time to build and
they're very expensive and out of sync with the time
constraints of most of our customer today," said Dave Douglas,
vice president of advanced technology at Sun, which is based in
Santa Clara, California.
The data centers of today -- which are little changed from
the earliest days of computing -- can cost more than $1,000 per
square foot to build, Douglas said.
Project Blackbox, as currently envisioned, is designed to
use Sun's Solaris 10 version of the Unix operating system,
coupled with Sun server and storage products. Sun said that a
single Blackbox can hold up to 240 Sun Fire servers and give
more than 1.4 petabytes of storage. A petabyte of data is
equivalent to 250 billion pages of text.
Sun's Douglas said that a price hasn't yet been set, but
Schwartz said that pricing would likely be a spectrum, with
customers able to buy Blackbox as they want it configured, or
to purchase it as a service.
Sun is increasingly offering its products -- servers,
storage, software and computer services -- on a subscription
model, in addition to outright purchase of hardware and
services.
Schwartz said that Sun engineers came up with the idea for
Blackbox about a year ago, partly in response to customer
requests and needs for improved power efficiencies.
Sun said that it had begun working with early customers and
it expects commercial availability slated for the middle of
2007.
Read the original article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/17/AR2006101700021.html
|
Get Informed 
