Project Blackbox is a prototype from Sun Microsystems for a data center built into a standard 20′ shipping container requiring only a water supply, external chiller, an internet connection, and power. It was first announced in October 2006. Utilizing existing infrastructure of transporting shipping containers, a complete data center of up to 250 servers can be rapidly deployed to locations that might not otherwise be suitable for a building or another structure. Sun Microsystems claims that the system can made operational for 1/100th of the cost of building a traditional data center.[1] 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. [2] [3] A Project Blackbox with 1088 AMD Opteron processors ranks #412 on the June 2007 TOP500 list. This concept of a datacenter in a shipping container originated at the Internet Archive circa 2003 in collaboration with IBM Almaden Research Center. Google was reported in November 2005 to be working on their own shipping container datacenter.[4] Although in January 2007 it was reported that the project had been discontinued[5], Google's patent on the concept was still pushed through the patent system and was successfully issued in October 2007.[6][7] It is not yet known if/how Google's patent will impact Sun's offering.
References
- ^ 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).
- ^ 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.
- 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)
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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