I am registered to see the BlackBox on tour this Friday in Des Moines. I am hoping to take some pictures, but wonder if they will let me.

I also invision the trailer park full of containers — perhaps you can request HBO as well for when you are administering servers insde. :)

Look for my review/impressions on BlackBox this weekend.
(http://datacenterlinks.blogspot.com/)

-John

Pssst! Hey man… want to buy a datacenter…?

I hadn’t thought about the in-aisle servicing. Maybe you take two people in with you, one on one side, one on the other. :-) (lame!)

1. A Sun Blackbox with 240 x64 boxes will run just shy of $2mil when you factor in a prepackaged chiller and distribution transformer. (Funny how Sun neglects to tell you their container needs hundreds of amps of 208v power, not readily available 480v straight off the pole.) Need filtered UPS power, generator, and transfer switch? Add another $250-500k. And where do you put the UPS?

2. Yes, at over twice the cost per square foot. There are other benefits to being mobile including taxes and code compliance issues.

3. The key is the efficiencies this design can bring to the table. The largest users of massive compute capacity are already building their own facilities in modular fashion. Containerized datacenter modules can cut their costs and significantly shorten build times.

4. It’s unlikely Sun has thought stacking through. It’s one thing at a dock with a specialized 100 ton forklift, it’s another thing altogether when trying to get some locals with a crane to rig a 15 ton $2million dollar load.

5. Sun is targeting the world market and 40ft containers are not prevalent inland anywhere other than the US.

6. The cooling plant needs matched to the environment. It’s up to the customer to choose ease of deployment (dry cool) vs complex deployment (evaporative water cooler with storage tanks and economizers).

7. Worse yet, how do you service the servers once the rack is in the aisle? Open both ends of the container so you can walk around to the other side to unplug/plug cables? What about dust and other airborn particulate while this is going on? I don’t buy Sun’s fail in place model. No one can afford to do that except Google with their dirt cheap servers.

8. GPS is for tracking, both in transit and once stationary. GPS tied to a GSM modem is only half the solution, there still needs to be additional security measures. GSM jammers are easy to purchase.

9. That is Sun’s plan.

10. They’re on the sides because they used a container with doors on both ends which is necessitated by their service model of the racks inside. You wouldn’t want these too close together anyway as even a good truck driver isn’t going to get them closer together than 6″.

11. Better question, why didn’t Sun tune their servers for the container and integrate UPSes or the necessary 480v to 208v three phase transformer. Rackable natively takes 480v and has integrated power backup.

Sun can only do 240 1U hosts per container. Rackable can do 600 1U hosts in a 20′ container. If you need compute nodes that’s over twice the servers per container.

Off the top of my head I can think of places like war zones for military use, disaster relief areas like during the tsunami or Katrina, or even third-world countries where a data center might be needed temporarily in the field. Even installations like the Olympics could be viable with this. I know they always build out huge data center like buildings for two weeks of broadcast.

Also, I believe they come custom installed, but I am not for sure. As for the GPS, does seem like they are expecting these to be stolen a lot.