Sun takes data centres underground

According to Sun, the answer is putting a data centre in a shipping container. It may sound unusual, but the recently launched initiative dubbed ‘Blackbox’ has been well received as a solution to some of the data storage issues facing corporations today. The portable data centre can hold tonnes of finely interlaced computer servers, so the next time you see a steel shipping container it may in fact hold the entire server network of a major Australian vendor.

“Just about every CIO and startup I meet says they’re crippled by data centre energy and space constraints – today's solutions are clearly failing to meet the needs of Web 2.0,” said Jonathan Schwartz, chief executive officer and president, Sun Microsystems.

These ‘data-centres-to-go’ can contain as many as 250 servers providing up to seven terabytes of active memory and over two petabytes of disk storage. The benefit to corporations is the time and cost saving of building a traditional computer room.

“Rather than trying to improve upon today’s data centre, designed for people babysitting computers, Project Blackbox starts from the world's most broadly adopted industry standard, the shipping container, and asks – how can we most efficiently create modular, lights-out data centers from this base?” said Schwartz.

Taking the idea to the next level, Sun and a group of other companies based in Japan are lowering Blackbox shipping containers into a coal mine located in the Chubu region, setting up an underground data centre using 50 percent less power than a ground-level data centre. The project will see Sun build 30 Blackbox self-contained units containing 10,000 servers, which will be located 100 metres underground. The data centre is predicted to provide services to public and private sector companies in April 2010.

Could this be an indication of the way the IT industry is heading? Greg Papadopoulos, chief technology officer, Sun Microsystems believes it could be.

“Project Blackbox symbolises a big bet we’re making as a company,” he explained. “It’s a bet that the billions and billions of client machines we’ll have in the future – desktops, handhelds, iPods, whatever – will spend most of their time interacting with the network.”

Blackbox has been showcased around the world, including Australia, to entice companies to consider the environmental benefits and portability of the solution.