Silicon Valley Sightings: Sun’s Project Blackbox

I’m starting a new category called Silicon Valley Sightings, which will compose of pictures of interesting tech related things I see.

This first one is the new Sun Data Center in a box, called Project Blackbox seen on 237 in East Palo Alto. This data center is what marketers call a “Solution Sell” when you bundle up services, hardware, software and support and repackage and apply to a business pain. These data centers contain web services, routers, networking equipment, storage, and sometimes remote power. You just plug it in for remote locations, high growth areas, or even for disaster computing needs (if your primary data center goes down, drop one of these in asap.

“Designed to address the needs of customers who are running out of space, power and cooling, Project Blackbox gives customers a glimpse into the fast, cost-effective datacenter deployments coming in the near future–where thinking out of the box means putting an IT infrastructure in a box.”

“It could have the following:

• A single Project Blackbox could accommodate 250 Sun Fire T1000 servers with the CoolThreads technology with 2000 cores and 8000 simultaneous threads.
• A single Project Blackbox could accommodate 250 x64-based servers with 1000 cores.
• A single Project Blackbox could provide as much as 1.5 petabytes of disk storage or 2 petabytes of energy-efficient tape storage.
• A single Project Blackbox could provide 7 terabytes of memory.
• A single Project Blackbox could handle up to 10,000 simultaneous desktop users.
• A single Project Blackbox currently has sufficient power and cooling to support 200 kilowatts of rackmounted equipment.

Check out the scenarios this could be deployed at: Uurban, disaster, even on Mars.  They forgot to include warzones… Great job with the Marketing and Packaging…now to see if this shipping container really sells or not.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 3rd, 2006 at 9:19 pm and is filed under Silicon Valley Sightings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.