Sun Modular Datacenter (Sun MD, known in the prototype phase as Project Blackbox) is a portable data center built into a standard 20' shipping container manufactured and marketed by Sun Microsystems. 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 1/100th 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]

History

The prototype was first announced as "Project Blackbox" in October 2006;[6] the official product was announced in January 2008.[7]

A Project Blackbox with 1088 AMD Opteron processors ranked #412 on the June 2007 TOP500 list.[8]

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.[9]

Google was reported in November 2005 to be working on their own shipping container datacenter.[10] Although in January 2007 it was reported that the project had been discontinued,[11] Google's patent on the concept was still pushed through the patent system and was successfully issued in October 2007.[12][13]

References

  1. ^ "Sun Modular Datacenter S20 - Technical Specifications" (2008-05-27).
  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).
  4. ^ "SLAC's Newest Computing Center Arrives... by Truck". SLAC Today (2007-07-25).
  5. ^ Rich Miller (2008-01-29). "Sun Rebrands Blackbox as 'Sun MD'", Data Center Knowledge, IDG TechNetwork. Retrieved on 27 June 2008. 
  6. ^ Sun Microsystems, Inc. (2006-10-17). "Sun Unveils The Future of Virtualized Datacenters – Project Blackbox". Press release. Retrieved on 2008-06-27.
  7. ^ "Sun Modular Datacenter Fuels Momentum With New Customer Wins In Manufacturing, Healthcare, HPC And Telco". Sun Microsystems (2008-01-29).
  8. ^ "Sun Project Blackbox". TOP500 Supercomputing Sites. TOP500.org (June 2007). Retrieved on 2008-06-27.
  9. ^ Bruce Baumgart; Matt Laue (2003-11-08). "Petabyte Box for Internet Archive" (PDF). Retrieved on 2008-06-27.
  10. ^ 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."
  11. ^ "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."
  12. ^ U.S. Patent 7,278,273 
  13. ^ 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.

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