Sun Formally Launches Project Blackbox Data Centers

Published: February 7, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

They are no longer painted black but rather white, and thus far Sun Microsystems only sold a handful of the units, but the Project Blackbox portable and modular data center has been formally productized after a little more than a year as the Modular Data Center S20, complete with a price tag and a supply chain for building units and delivering them to customers.

Back in October 2006, Sun launched Project Blackbox, a data center design packed into a 20-foot standard shipping container--the ones that cross the oceans and the highways of the world, full of the junk that we buy as consumers. In the past year, the company's top brass have been not only talking up the idea of cramming a bunch of servers and storage into a shipping container that is equipped with gear to keep it cool, but Sun has also been dragging a display model around 73 cities on four continents to let 12,000 people walk through the tightly packed box and to ponder how they might use one. Sun is big on all things green these days--meaning efficiency and the money it can create for its business--and Rackable Systems soon followed with its own Concentro data center in a can offering in March 2007.

The reason why Sun and Rackable are offering such products, which cannot even be said to be beyond the prototype stage, really, is simple. Data centers are running out of power, cooling, and space, and by using shipping containers with everything crammed close, Sun reckons that it can provide the same computing power in one third of the space of a conventional raised floor data center--and do so at about one-fifth the price of building that data center and with a power and cooling cost that is about 20 percent lower because of the efficiencies created by getting computing and storage capacity packed in close and using the walls of the shipping container as giant heat sinks. Using its latest gear, Sun reckons that a MD S20 container can house 18 teraflops of computing capacity or 3 petabytes of disk storage.

According to Darlene Yaplee, vice president of integrated platform marketing at Sun, the company has sold a handful of the units so far even before general availability last week. The first one went to Stanford University's Linear Accelerator facility, which bought one last year and has just added a second unit. Hansen Transmissions, a Belgian maker of wind turbines and gear boxes, has plunked down an MD S20 at its factory in India, which it is expanding rapidly because of demand for its products. (More green there, obviously.) Mobile TeleSystems, the biggest cell phone operator in Russia, also bought a data center in a can from Sun to help it run its billing operations for its 80 million cell phone customers in the former Soviet Union states. Interestingly, Yaplee says that the MS 20 was up and running the application in 22 days from the moment Sun's sales force started talking about a possible order. (Speed of additional capacity is also why Stanford University bought its two MD 20s.) The Nijmegen Medical Centre, a teaching hospital associated with Radboud University in the Netherlands, had a packed data center and needed more capacity for servers and storage, so it put it in the parking lot.

A base MD S20 data center, without any servers, storage, chillers, or power units, costs $559,000. That price includes the modified storage container, the closed-loop internal cooling system, the empty server and storage racks, and dehumidifiers. The MD S20 can be located in any spot that has a temperature range of between -20 degrees and 130 degrees Fahrenheit (-29 degrees to 54 degrees Celsius).

Sun is building the units in its Oregon and Colorado factories, and can obviously ship them anywhere in the world where you can move a shipping container. Sun's Customer Ready System factory integration program can configure and set up the servers, storage, networking, and other gear that will go into the MD S20 data center, so it can all be quickly plugged in once it reaches its destination. Sun is also offering lights out management of systems for customers who don't want to do it themselves, and is happy to provide an assessment for any physical data center to see how the MD S20 might plug in to augment that facility. The unit can house up to eight racks, and can cool servers and storage that burn up to 25 kilowatts per rack.

Yaplee says that making the MD S20 RHoS compliant took a little time, which is why the ramp to general availability took a bit longer than many expected. She was not at liberty to say precisely how many boxes have been sold to date, but said that the pipeline for orders was now "strong globally and across markets." She added that most of the deals in the pipeline are for more than one unit, too. Commercial customers, who don't want to build a traditional data center with enough room to handle four or five years of growth are interested in the MD S20 because they can just buy what they need. Educational institutions are also keen on it, but for a different reason. You can't plan for when that grant money is going to come through for new computing capacity, but when it does, you need to spend the dough now and you want to get the gear up and running fast. The MD S20 lets Sun help university computing centers move quickly. You can bet that governments--particularly the armed services--are also interested in the Blackbox approach, since they have had to build modular data centers themselves up until now. It has to be less expensive to buy one from Sun or Rackable and put some camouflage paint on it.

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