Sunday, November 05, 2006

Get Your IT On

Sun Microsystems is working on the world's first virtualized datacenter, Project Blackbox.

Project Blackbox is a prototype of the world's first virtualized datacenter built into a standard 20' shipping container. The design is supposed to be "one-hundredth of the initial cost", "one-fifth the cost per square foot", "twenty percent (20%) more efficient" and "requires one-third the space of a conventional with equivalent computing power". Built into a standard shipping container, the Blackbox is easily shipped, delivered and stored wherever it is needed. Upon delivery, you only need to hookup cool water, hot water, AC power and a network connection to begin using it (check out the video to see). Even more, the Blackbox "could handle up to 10,000 simultaneous desktop users".

So what does this mean (from the site):
  • A large Web 2.0 company struggling to keep pace with growth could rapidly build a datacenter and place it next to an inexpensive, green energy source.
  • A New York firm could place a container in a New Jersey warehouse, on a rooftop, or in a parking garage where space is abundant or less expensive. This would allow a company to increase datacenter capacity without having to undertake the cost and complexity of building a new class-A facility.
  • Global relief organizations could leverage Project Blackbox's easy management and support for up to 10,000 simultaneous desktop users - without administrators - to bring computing to remote villages and quickly mobilize IT systems to support relief efforts.
  • Governments worldwide could move data and applications close to field operations and away from terrorists or disasters quickly and confidently by taking advantage of Project Blackbox's powerful, ruggedized design.
  • An oil company could bring high-performance computing to offshore oil rigs for on-site seismic modeling in the ocean or onto supertankers to simulate fluid load.



This connects us back to the earlier post "We're All Petafiles Now".
"Maybe we can't throw out all of the old rules. Geography might matter after all; natural resources sure do. The New Yorker has a great article on the desperate need for water in the developing world – India in particular is crippled by its inability to solve this basic need, despite its brilliance in software development. Sadly, they don’t have it online, but here is a link to an interview with the author."
Project Blackbox seems to address the difficulties of the petascale era. The Blackboxes will provide some flexibility to companies and enable them to move datacenters to locations that enable them to take advantage of lower energy rates or greener energy. "Customers who select a configuration with the Sun Fire CoolThreads technology-based servers will save about $1,000 a year per Sun Fire T2000 or Sun Fire T1000 server in energy costs, in addition to cost savings provided by the container's cooling advantage over existing datacenter implementations."

And one last tid-bit...

Hear Jonathan Schwartz, CEO and President, Sun Microsystems talk about Moore's Law, Web 2.0 and future of the marketplace. Very interesting. Listen here.

1 Comments:

Blogger Michael said...

Really neat technology! I can imagine a fleet of these driving our nation's highways, serving as distributed computing hubs for large scientific research projects.

12:05 AM  

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