After Sun Microsystems Inc. revealed Project Blackbox in October, the world's first virtualized mobile data centre visited Toronto this week, hitting the road (on wheels) as part of an international tour.
The largest data centre to cross the Canadian border, Project Blackbox is a 20-foot-long shipping container housing a customized and compact configuration of Sun technology (or compatible third-party equipment) of servers, storage and networking gear.
Project Blackbox, said Sun, would outperform traditional data centres that are generally costly, complex, inflexible, power and space consumptive, and take long to deploy.
Project Blackbox supports the ability to easily scale data centres, enabling a more modular-level growth, said Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Michael Bohlig, senior director of business development for Project Blackbox, who manned the tour.
He said this is a far better option than "taking that big jump of $10 or 20 million at a time, and then waiting the two or three years till it actually gets constructed."
Specifically, he said, it's a mere one-tenth of the time (equal to a few months) it takes to design, build, and deploy a traditional data centre.
Energy savings are as much as 25 per cent, Bohlig said, and the integrated cooling system (that he likens to a "cyclone effect happening inside the container") is 20 per cent more efficient.
"It's a fully functional standalone data centre. All you need is a network connection and you've got a data centre that is the equivalent of 3,000 square feet of [traditional] data centre space," the Sun executive said.
Eight standard-sized racks are packed in a 160-square-foot space. Seven of them can be populated with a chosen combination of server, storage and networking gear; and the remaining rack is for network switches, a dehumidifier, thermal management systems, and security alarm.
In a traditional data centre, floor space and racks are not fully utilized as cool air needs to circulate between racks.
Bohlig said with Project Blackbox, however, the racks and required cooling gear have been compacted so as to support 25kW of power per rack. The average data centre averages 3kW per rack, he said.
The availability and low cost of shipping containers – standard mode of freight transportation – drives value for customers, said Bohlig.
Part of this, he said, is multi-modality, or the ability to transport the data centre via ship, train, aircraft, helicopter, etc. Also, availability of gear, such as forklifts and dollies, was necessary to move containers.
Mobility can be a cost savings too, said Bohlig, given that a company can move the Blackbox some place where energy is cheaper, the climate cooler, or where real estate is more affordable, such as a rooftop in Tokyo, Japan.
And the kicker - Blackbox is green: the container is reusable and recyclable.
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