Rackable Builds Data Centers in Shipping Containers, Too

Published: March 29, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Emulation is the sincerest form of flattery, and it is a basic principle of business, too. And that is why Rackable Systems will today launch its own variant of an idea floated by Sun Microsystems with its Project Blackbox: self-contained data centers, complete with servers and storage, put inside of standard metal shipping containers.

Given Rackable's position in the market as a supplier of X64-based servers that have a slightly different tack on engineering, with a particular focus on density and power conservation, you would expect that the company would boast that it can do a better job than Sun did with its Blackbox. And, perhaps with the Concentro containerized data centers, it has.

According to Conor Malone, director of data center solutions at Rackable, the initial Concentro product is based on a 40-foot by 8-foot cargo container; Sun's was based on a container half that size. Rackable has very dense servers, mainly because its rack-mounted servers are half as deep as standard X64 boxes and therefore pack in twice as deep--something that is made possible because each rack has a DC power supply rather than having each server have its own AC power supply. This means it can cram a lot of machines in that 40-foot container. Malone says that 1,200 1U rack servers, with a total of 9,600 processor cores can fit in the container, leaving about 10 feet of space for a console desk in the front and some room for storage and networking gear as well. Such a box would weigh about 40,000 pounds, if you are curious. A single container could also be equipped with about 3.5 petabytes of disk capacity.

To cool this dense packing of computing equipment, the first Concentro setups will use a combination of air and water cooling. The racks are equipped with a series of large-diameter reverse curve impeller fans, which pull air off the servers and blow it across water-chilled heat exchangers, which cool the air and then return it back to the servers. With this large-fan approach and the radiator/chiller combination, according to Malone, each server can have its fan removed, which across all the servers in a Concentro setup saves approximately 23 kilowatts of power. That is about as much juice as a full rack of blade servers burns. The design has allowed Rackable to cut the amount of power needed to cool the servers by 80 percent, according to its initial tests.

Each container can draw between 150 kilowatts and 200 kilowatts of power and not overheat, and they can be deployed on a rooftop or a parking lot where it can get hot. "We think we can put it anywhere," says Malone. "Including in the desert." The issue is to get an appropriately sized chiller to sit next to it.

With the announcement of Blackbox, one of the jokes going around is that by putting the data center in a truck container and putting it in the parking lot, you are essentially inviting theft, and helping to facilitate it. "We have made the Concentro intentionally non-descript, and we have also put a GPS tracking system in it in case it starts going down the road," says Malone. So, basically, it has a LoJack.

While Rackable is thinking of the Concentro product as a means of helping data centers build out, the density of these containers may cause companies to rethink their centralized data center strategies--particularly for companies with lots of operations scattered around. "The density in the container lends itself to wholesale data center replacement," says Malone.

For companies that want more resilient data centers and to not be subject to local disasters or Internet or power outages that can affect data centers located in one place, it may become vogue to have geographical distribution of data centers again. The low cost of the containers, even with a roof and some cheap walls--what Rackable calls the "Home Depot" data center, with some poured concrete and a cheap roof--compared to real data centers, combined with the risk of having all of your eggs in one or few baskets, could make this idea appealing. Think of them as data parks instead of data centers.

And because these Concentro boxes are on shocks, they are actually mobile with the equipment inside of them. So if you need to move your data center, you do.

Rackable is exploring using the smaller 10-foot and 20-foot containers, and will eventually deliver an air-cooled variant that does not require the radiators.

Rackable did not announce pricing, and says that it is exploring its options in selling versus leasing configured Concentro containers.

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