Internet Archive Gets a Place in the Sun (Portable Data Center)

Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive and a longtime digital librarian, demonstrates how big he thinks the Internet is at the launch event of the archive project in Santa Clara, Calif.

The Internet Archive is powered by 60 Sun X4500 “Thumper” storage arrays, which are industrial-strength capacity managers. Each Thumper (a rack of them is shown in this photo) holds 48 disk drives, each 1TB in capacity.

Sun engineer Jud Cooley—aptly named because he’s one of the company’s experts on data center power and cooling issues and is a representative to the Green Grid consortium—poses with one of his special projects.

A pair of signboards at the launch illustrate how the Sun portable modular data centers can be deployed. They can be transported by ship, train, truck, airplane or helicopter to just about anywhere in the world.

Sun business development specialist Rodger Lindquist shows off the innards of the modular data center that houses the Internet Archive.

The Internet Archive data center is housed in a quiet section of the parklike Sun campus in Santa Clara, Calif.

For years before Sun moved its headquarters to the location in the late 1990s, the Santa Clara campus was run by the state of California as the Agnews Hospital.