Not exactly portable (unless you have a container lorry or ship handy), but I’d love to have one of Sun’s Sun’s Modular Datacenters available to use.
The Modular Datacenter (otherwise known as Project Blackbox) squeezes 7 or 8 racks, depending on the the configuration fits 240 or 280 Us of rackspace into a standard shipping container. The idea is that you can deploy one of these containers very quickly with your desired set up, either to handle all of your datacenter requirements (which it could), or it’s used as a quick solution for a particular project.
Interestingly, I can also see it as a potential solution for cloud computing. Not only would a one of these containers make an excellent datacenter in it’s own right, but the ability to quickly expand the capacity when you need kinda takes the idea of cloud computing and easily expanded capacity to another level.
Sun are not the only people doing these datacenters in a container though:
- HP have the POD
- IBM have their Scalable Modular Data Center
- Rackable have their ICE Cube Portable Data Center system
- Verari have the FOREST (Flexible, Open, Reliable, Energy efficient, Scalable and Transportable) Container Solution
All of them promote the density and power of the systems and, more importantly in todays climate, their energy efficiency.
In an ideal world we’d line these all up next to each other and compare them, but I hardly think that would be practical. It would, however, be interesting to see what sort of power, performance and flexibility these systems offered.