Sun’s project Blackbox
What’s this then? A large shipping container with Sun Microsystems computers in it maybe? Well almost right. But this isn’t a standard shipment of Sun equipment, but rather a fully ready datacentre in a box.
This container contains a datacentre that is ranked in the top 200 super computers around the world, all in the space of a standard shipping container. What this means is you can now take super-computing wherever it is needed.
For example, take last years Live 8 show. If the London Hyde Park show wanted to process all Live 8 worldwide communications on site, they could ship one of these containers onto the site and have a full datacentre ready for use within a day.
More likely scenarios are when datacentres in existing facilities reach capacity. Rather than moving to a larger facility, organisations can now bolt-on new datacentres, placing Blackbox’s on the roof of their building, or more likely the car park.
Moreover, these boxes can be stacked up to create many datacentres together creating a totally scalable super-computer. This means that datacentre providers can now rent relatively cheap warehouse space and fill it with blackboxes to create an incredibly cheap super-datacentre, rivalling most of todays super computers.
This probably means that serious computing power is going to get cheaper as more processing power is available.
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