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- Your turn: Predict the next big thing
February 19, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Project Blackbox
A portable datacenter may seem like pie in the sky, but in fact, Sun Microsystems has already constructed it. Whether Project Blackbox, which Sun calls the first virtualized datacenter, catches on remains to be seen, but for some, the concept is compelling.
Take a 20-foot shipping container; provide it with integrated cooling, networking, and power distribution; add external hookups for hot and cold water, 208-volt three-phase AC power, and Ethernet networking; integrate sensors, alarms, and GPS; fill its eight 19-inch shock-tolerant racks with servers -- either 120 Sun Fire T2000 servers or 250 Sun Fire T1000 systems -- and you've got one or two thousand processor cores, 7TB of memory, and more than 2PB of storage. Connect them all as a grid, for simplicity.
According to Sun, this configuration can support 10,000 simultaneous desktops without requiring an administrator, and it can be located almost anywhere: on a rooftop, in a parking garage, in a secure warehouse. It can be delivered rapidly, even to theaters of operation or catastrophe areas. What's more, Sun claims that a Project Blackbox datacenter is a tenth the price of a standard datacenter and that it can be turned on and configured in a day.
So if you find yourself unable to build or power or cool a datacenter fast enough to keep up with your enterprise's growth, or you're in need of a server farm on the go or at a hard-to-reach outpost such as an oil rig, you may find yourself in the market for this deliverable soon.
-- Martin Heller
What's your take on Project Blackbox? What other approaches to virtualization do you see creeping into the enterprise?
Posted by Jason Snyder on February 19, 2007 03:00 AM
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Why is this such a crackpot idea? It's absolutely brilliant! I work for a banking institution that has computers scattered all over the planet, do I care any of them are in a shipping container?! NO! Does the bank care where they're located as long as it's safe for the equipment?! NO! The container is steel, it'll never catch fire. It's probably more fire resistant than our best datacenter which has people and trash cans and microwave ovens and vending machines and lots of paper. I think it's an idea that's been a long time coming. Kudos to the people at Sun Microsystems for putting this product on the cluetrain.
Best Regards
--dio
Your turn: The next big thing? From the far-fetched to the practical, we highlighted 12 technologies that have a history of riding the thin edge between harebrained and brilliant. Yet each has the potential to significantly shake up some aspect of the enterprise down the line.
So, bust out your crackpot meter and weigh in on whether these could-be pie-in-the-sky notions have a future by commenting on them on this blog. If you don't see a past or present contender you'd like to nominate and want to predict the next big crackpot thing... HAVE YOUR SAY HERE |
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