Sun Project BlackBox

I'm sure you have already heard about Sun Micro's "Project Blackbox" where they vow that "we will never look at a shipping container the same way again"

I was curious, I knew what is was (a big black shipping container that's also a data center) but I didn't know the details.

The Blackbox arrived in Europe in mid May after completing its tour throught the USA. It's now currently in Germany, though the website hasn't been updated to say so, and was 'officially' introduced to German journalists on Thursday June 21st in Munich Germany after travelling through Austria. So since it's in my new neighborhood I wanted to see what the fuss was about.

It was also launched the same day as the Eco-Tour and continues the theme of Sun's "global social-responsibility campaign".

What I found interesting is that it's cooling system is 20% more efficient than traditional data centers. Sun doesn't say how it achieves those efficiencies but maybe it is because of it being designed to fit into a shipping container? Also as part of Suns Eco Responsibility campaign they have promised to take back any container they sell and recycle it in an "enviornmentally friendly way"

I downloaded the official brochure from sun and I found the following excerpt quite interesting.

Project Blackbox can be populated with 250 Sun Fire servers configured for grid computing across seven racks inside the container. An eighth rack contains network switches, a dehumidifier, thermal management systems, and alarm and EPO controls. However, organizations have considerable flexibility in determining how their Project Blackbox containers are configured-- and the level of performance they can deliver. For example, one container can:

• Hold 120 Sun Fire" T2000 systems--or 250 Sun Fire" T1000 systems with 2,000 cores and 8,000 simultaneous threads. 250 CoolThreads" technology- based servers support four times the number of Web users and provide five times the efficiency of the same number of similarly configured Dell Xeon servers
  • Customers will also save approximately $1,000 per CoolThreads technology- based system per year in energy costs over traditional datacenters, as well as savings from the container's cooling advantages
  • Customers in Northern California qualify for energy rebates of up to $240,000 if they upgrade from Xeon-based systems to Sun Fire CoolThreads technology-based servers in Project Blackbox
• Hold up to 1,000 x64 cores
• Support seven terabytes of memory
• Provide more than two petabytes of storage
• Provides easy management of and support for up to 10,000 simultaneous desktop users--without administrators
• Host a configuration that would place it among the 200 fastest supercomputers in the world

petabyte? Holy! That is one hell of a lot of space, I mean a petabyte is 1,024 terabytes! Then again if you are dealing with image or video data then two petabytes may be something you may just need, but still!

You can see where the Blackbox currently is, depending on how frequently they update the website, but from what I have heard is that it will be at the International Supercomputing Convention in Dresden Germany tomorrow.

The truck carrying the BlackBox is black, and the trailer is completely black without a single Sun Logo, it reminds me of rig they used in the 80's tv show knight Rider. I would be concerned that it would be the target of a hijacking for the technology/worth of the cargo on board and is probably the reason for the stealthy appearance.

Interestingly enough Sun plans to take the Blackbox into Russia as well.