Sun have announced recently an amazing solution named Project Blackbox, he world’s first virtualized datacenter built into a shipping container. Designed to address the needs of customers who are running out of space, power and cooling, Project Blackbox gives customers a glimpse into the fast, cost-effective datacenter deployments coming in the near future – where thinking out of the box means putting an IT infrastructure in a box.
“Just about every CIO and startup I meet says they’re crippled by datacenter energy and space constraints — today’s solutions are clearly failing to meet the needs of Web 2.0,” said Jonathan Schwartz,CEO and president, Sun Microsystems.
A single Project Blackbox could accommodate 250 Sun Fire T1000 servers with the CoolThreads technology with 2000 cores and 8000 simultaneous threads, 250 x64-based servers with 1000 cores, as much as 1.5 petabytes of disk storage or 2 petabytes of energy-efficient tape storage, 7 terabytes of memory, could handle up to 10,000 simultaneous desktop users, as sufficient power and cooling to support 200 kilowatts of rackmounted equipment.
Project Blackbox packages compute, storage, and network infrastructure capabilities into scalable, modular units outfitted with state-of-the-art cooling, monitoring, and power distribution systems. Customers will be able to order a variety of standard and custom configurations of systems, storage, networking, and software. Housed in a standard 20-foot shipping container for maximum flexibility, Project Blackbox will be easily transported using common shipping methods. Simple hookups for water, AC power, and networking will enable customers to quickly deploy Project Blackbox upon delivery.
Based on shipping container, Project Blackbox could have many usage scenarios in oil rigs for seismic modeling, in undeveloped space, Assemble offsite datacenters to leverage lower power and real estate costs, and even in space ! It could be interesting for international events that require high computing and storage capabilities. Project Blackbox will give customers the flexibility to move applications to optimal locations to take advantage of lower energy rates, avoid power outages, and tap cheaper, greener energy.
Project Blackbox will change the way you think about datacenters, you might check the project’s website for more information and download the PDF with complete info packet.
