Yesterday marked the end of Sun Microsystem Europe's Eco tour 2007. The tour, using a hybrid bicycle, was used to highlight locations throughout Germany that either used energy efficiently or produced energy efficient consumer products.

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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

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