After a year of touring and promotion, Sun Microsystems mobile data center is ready for sale with new services and a new name.After a 15-month test drive, Sun Microsystems' data center on wheels is ready to roll out of the showroom and onto the street.
Since October 2006, Sun has been heavily promoting its mobile data center, or "Project Blackbox," as an alternative to traditional brick-and-mortar data centers. Now, under its official nameSun Modular Datacenterthe 20-by-8-by-8 trailer goes on sale Jan. 29.
Since its introduction, Blackbox has been on a whirlwind tour both inside and outside the
United Statesas Sun has looked to drum up interest in the mobile data center. When
it officially goes on sale, at a base price of $559,000, Sun will add
some additional services, which include setting up the equipment, an
assessment of a enterprise's IT needs and remote management
capabilities.
While some analyst have given Sun credit for looking at customers' concerns about data centers in a new waythe issues range from floor space to cooling to compute powermany also believe that few enterprises will take a mobile approach to these problems.
"Sun
does a really good job at creating buzz around the company's ideas,"
said Charles King, an analyst with Pund-IT Research. "There are some
applications where a highly portable, very powerful data center
environment makes a lot of sense. I have a feeling that this is one of
those issues where it makes a great deal of sense from an engineering
point of view, but it runs into the heavy weather when it comes to
changing behavioral wisdom."
While
King sees the modular data center has a viable solution for companies
concerned about recovering from a large-scale disaster, there are few
other areas where he sees customers running out to buy a 20-foot
shipping container fully loaded with servers, storage and networking
infrastructure.
Darlene
Yaplee, vice president for Integrated Platforms and Systems Marketing
at Sun, said the company already has several diverse customers,
including Mobile TeleSystems OJSC, a Russian mobile phone operator, and
the Linear Accelerator Center run by Stanford University and the U.S. Department of Energy.
While
Sun is touting these and other customers as proof there is an interest
for a mobile data center, Sun executives did not discuss how many
customers it projects will buy modular data centers in the next several
months.
"We
have found that it has broad applicability," said Yaplee, pointing to
list its current list of customers. "We have seen different examples of
customers using the data center in different ways. It's not just one
segment. What we are hearing from our customers is that many of them
are growing out of their current data center space and they are looking
for a high density solution that is eco-efficient."
The
Sun mobile data center is capable of working not only with Sun servers,
storage and networking, but a wide-range of other hardware from other
vendors as long as it can fit into the trailer's 19-inch racks. When
fully loaded, the data center can offer up to 18 teraflops or 18
trillion calculations per second of computing power and up to three
petabytes of disk capacity along with Sun's specific services for
customers.
With
this market, Sun has little competition except for Rackable Systems,
which began selling its second-generation mobile data centerICE (Integrated Concentro Environment) Cubein September. Unlike Sun's modular data center, the ICE Cube only uses Rackable equipment and is made to order for customers.
Sun,
a much larger company, has several mobile data centers ready to ship
once customers specify what type of hardware equipment they require for
a project.