Sun Modular Datacenter

Sun Modular Datacenter (Sun MD, known in the prototype phase as Project Blackbox) is a portable data center built into a standard 20-foot intermodal container (shipping container) manufactured and marketed by Sun Microsystems (which is now owned by Oracle Corporation). An external chiller and power are required for the operation of a Sun MD. A data center of up to 280 servers 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 it to the required infrastructure.[1] Sun Microsystems states that the system can made operational for 1% of the cost of building a traditional data center.[2]

Contents

Customers

On 14 July 2007, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) deployed a Sun MD containing 252 Sun Fire X2200 compute nodes as a compute farm.[3][4] Other customers include Radboud University.[5]

In 2009, the Internet Archive migrated its digital archive onto Sun Modular Datacenter. [6]

History

The prototype was first announced as "Project Blackbox" in October 2006;[7] the official product was announced in January 2008.[8]

A Project Blackbox with 1088 AMD Opteron processors ranked #412 on the June 2007 TOP500 list.[9]

In late 2003, employees of the Internet Archive wrote a paper proposing "an outdoor petabyte JBOD NAS box" of sufficient capacity to store the then-current Archive in a 40' shipping container.[10]. The first implementation of the concept have been realized using Sun Microsystems' Modular Datacenters in March 2009.[11]

Google was reported in November 2005 to be working on their own shipping container datacenter.[12] Although in January 2007 it was reported that the project had been discontinued,[13] Google's patent on the concept was still pushed through the patent system and was successfully issued in October 2007.[14][15] In 2009 Google announced that their first container based data center has been in production since 2005.[16]

References

  1. ^ "Sun Modular Datacenter S20 - Technical Specifications". 2008-05-27. http://www.sun.com/products/sunmd/s20/specifications.jsp. 
  2. ^ M. Mitchell Waldrop - "Data Center In a Box", Scientific American, August 2007
  3. ^ "SLAC Prepares for First Blackbox to Expand Computing Power". SLAC Today. 2007-06-20. http://today.slac.stanford.edu/feature/2007/blackbox1.asp. 
  4. ^ "SLAC's Newest Computing Center Arrives... by Truck". SLAC Today. 2007-07-25. http://today.slac.stanford.edu/feature/2007/blackbox2.asp. 
  5. ^ Rich Miller (2008-01-29). "Sun Rebrands Blackbox as 'Sun MD'". Data Center Knowledge (IDG TechNetwork). http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/Jan/29/sun_rebrands_blackbox_as_sun_md.html. Retrieved 2008-06-27. 
  6. ^ "Internet Archive and Sun Microsystems Create Living History of the Internet". Sun Microsystems. 2009-03-25. http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2009-03/sunflash.20090325.1.xml. Retrieved 2009-03-27. 
  7. ^ "Sun Unveils The Future of Virtualized Datacenters – Project Blackbox" (Press release). Sun Microsystems, Inc.. 2006-10-17. http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2006-10/sunflash.20061017.3.xml. Retrieved 2008-06-27. 
  8. ^ "Sun Modular Datacenter Fuels Momentum With New Customer Wins In Manufacturing, Healthcare, HPC And Telco". Sun Microsystems. 2008-01-29. http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2008-01/sunflash.20080129.1.xml. 
  9. ^ "Sun Project Blackbox". TOP500 Supercomputing Sites. TOP500.org. June 2007. http://top500.org/site/history/2827. Retrieved 2008-06-27. 
  10. ^ Bruce Baumgart; Matt Laue (2003-11-08) (PDF). Petabyte Box for Internet Archive. http://www.baumgart.org/petabytebox.pdf. Retrieved 2008-06-27. 
  11. ^ "Internet Archive and Sun Microsystems Create Living History of the Internet". Sun.COM. March 2009. http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2009-03/sunflash.20090325.1.xml. Retrieved 2009-03-30. 
  12. ^ 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. http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2005/pulpit_20051117_000873.html. Retrieved 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." 
  13. ^ "Whatever Happened to that Google Cargo Container Idea?". January 10, 2007. http://battellemedia.com/archives/003250.php. Retrieved 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." 
  14. ^ U.S. Patent 7,278,273
  15. ^ Jones, K.C. (October 10, 2007). "Google Wins Patent For Data Center In A Box; Trouble For Sun, Rackable, IBM?". InformationWeek. http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=202400961. Retrieved 2007-11-19. 
  16. ^ "Google container data center tour". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRwPSFpLX8I. 

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