Sun Modular Datacenter
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Sun Modular Datacenter (Sun MD, known in the prototype phase as Project Blackbox) is a portable data center built into a standard 20' shipping container manufactured and marketed by Sun Microsystems. A water supply, an external chiller, an internet connection, and power are required for the operation of a Sun MD. A data center of up to 280 servers[1] can be rapidly deployed by shipping the container in a regular way to locations that might not be suitable for a building or another structure, and connecting to the required infrastructure. Sun Microsystems claims that the system can made operational for 1/100th of the cost of building a traditional data center.[2]
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[edit] Customers
On 23 April 2007 at the HEPiX conference, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) announced that a Project Blackbox will be deployed for the next compute farm, which will contain 252 Sun Fire X2200 compute nodes.[3][4]
Other customers include Radboud University.[citation needed]
[edit] History
The official product was announced in January 2008.[5]
The prototype, Project Blackbox, was first announced in October 2006.[citation needed]
A Project Blackbox with 1088 AMD Opteron processors ranks #412 on the June 2007 TOP500 list. [1]
This concept of a datacenter in a shipping container originated at the Internet Archive circa 2003 in collaboration with IBM Almaden Research Center.[citation needed]
Google was reported in November 2005 to be working on their own shipping container datacenter.[6] Although in January 2007 it was reported that the project had been discontinued,[7] Google's patent on the concept was still pushed through the patent system and was successfully issued in October 2007.[8][9]
[edit] Footnotes
- ^ Sun Modular Datacenter S20 - Technical Specifications (2008-05-27).
- ^ M. Mitchell Waldrop - "Data Center In a Box", Scientific American, August 2007
- ^ SLAC Prepares for First Blackbox to Expand Computing Power. SLAC Today (2007-06-20).
- ^ SLAC's Newest Computing Center Arrives... by Truck. SLAC Today (2007-07-25).
- ^ Sun Modular Datacenter Fuels Momentum With New Customer Wins In Manufacturing, Healthcare, HPC And Telco. Sun Microsystems (2008-01-29).
- ^ Robert X. Cringely (November 17, 2005). Google-Mart: Sam Walton Taught Google More About How to Dominate the Internet Than Microsoft Ever Did. I, Cringely. PBS. Retrieved on 2007-11-19. “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.”
- ^ Whatever Happened to that Google Cargo Container Idea? (January 10, 2007). Retrieved on 2007-11-19. “But managers were too timid to pack in enough servers, so the experiment was not cost-effective and was ultimately canceled, he said.”
- ^ U.S. Patent 7,278,273
- ^ Jones, K.C. (October 10, 2007). Google Wins Patent For Data Center In A Box; Trouble For Sun, Rackable, IBM?. InformationWeek. Retrieved on 2007-11-19.
[edit] References
- The data center in a shipping container as described by the Internet Archive 'to drum up interest in this concept' (November 8th, 2003).
- Architecture for Modular Data Centers proposed by James Hamilton (Architect on the Windows Live Core team, Microsoft)
[edit] External links
- Project Blackbox Site
- Project Blackbox Photos
- Project Blackbox Blog
- Project Blackbox Earthquake Resistance and Reliability Test (Video at YouTube)
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