With 'instant and portable' phrase gaining momentum in enterprises, Sun Microsystems has initiated a preview of its much talked about Project Blackbox.
It's a fully loaded data center with the entire computing, storage and networking infrastructure along with necessary power and cooling tools, packaged in a stackable shipping container.
The latest prototype by Sun is being designed to provide organizations with a rapidly deployable data center facility, which is completely independent of space, time or location constraints.
With Solaris 10 as the operating system (OS), the pre-configured data center will be able to house up to 250 Sun Fire servers and provide two petabytes of storage capacity or even seven Terabytes of memory.
Sun hopes that the innovative technology will have a far reaching effect with customers, who are running short of space at their existing data center facilities.
Those customers wanting to establish a back up for unforeseen events and crisis situations or quickly set up operations in far-flung remote locations will find great use for the 'takeaway' data center claimed Sun.
Commenting on the project, Jonathan Schwartz, CEO and president, Sun Microsystems said, "Just about every CIO and startup I meet, says they're crippled by data center energy and space constraints. Rather than trying to improve upon today's data center, designed for people babysitting computers, Project Blackbox starts from the world's most broadly adopted industry standard, the shipping container, and asks how can we most efficiently create modular, lights-out data centers from this base? The answer? With one-hundredth of the initial cost, one-fifth the cost per square foot, and with 20 percent more power efficiency, we can deliver an immense multiple of capacity and capability, anywhere on earth."
Project Blackbox is currently in the late prototype phase and Sun is already working with some select customers.
The commercial availability of the technology is expected in the second half of 2007.
