Sun Modular Datacenter (Sun MD, known in the prototype phase as Project Blackbox) is a portable

data center A data center (American English) or data centre (British English)See spelling differences. is a building, a dedicated space within a building, or a group of buildings used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunic ...

built into a standard 20-foot

intermodal container An intermodal container, often called a shipping container, is a large standardized shipping container, designed and built for intermodal freight transport, meaning these containers can be used across different Mode of transport, modes of trans ...

(shipping container) manufactured and marketed by

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the ...

(acquired in 2010 by

Oracle Corporation Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation headquartered in Austin, Texas. In 2020, Oracle was the third-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. The company sells da ...

). An external chiller and power were required for the operation of a Sun MD. A data center of up to 280

server Server may refer to: Computing *Server (computing), a computer program or a device that provides functionality for other programs or devices, called clients Role * Waiting staff, those who work at a restaurant or a bar attending customers and su ...

s could be rapidly deployed by shipping the container in a regular way to locations that might not be suitable for a building or another structure, and connecting it to the required

infrastructure Infrastructure is the set of facilities and systems that serve a country, city, or other area, and encompasses the services and facilities necessary for its economy, households and firms to function. Infrastructure is composed of public and priv ...

. Sun stated that the system could be made operational for 1% of the cost of building a traditional data center.

History

The prototype was first announced as "Project Blackbox" in October 2006; the official product was announced in January 2008. A Project Blackbox with 1088 Advanced Micro Devices Opteron processors ranked #412 on the June 2007

TOP500 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computing, distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these ...

list. The Sun Modular Datacenter, aka: Project Blackbox, was a concept design between MIT alums, Greg Papadopoulos and Dave Douglas from Sun Labs and Danny Hillis from Applied Minds to determine what is the largest possible “thumb drive” that can still be easily transported worldwide by truck, rail, and air. Their decision was a 20 foot standard shipping container would be ideal as transportation methods exist in near every country around the world. Internally the 20 foot container was highly modified modified to hold 8ea 40RU compute racks of servers and/or storage. Initial target audience was for secure portable DC and for disaster relief to allow internet access for email and insurance forms. Prototype build occurred remotely at Applied Minds facility, managed by Adam Yates from Applied Minds and Russ Rinfret from Sun The team behind Project Blackbox Marketing * Darlene Yaplee, Sr Director * Michael Bohlig * Cheryl Martin * Bob Schiolmueller, Technical Marketing * Joe Carvalho, Technical Marketing Engineering * Jud Cooley, Sr Director for Project * Chuck Perry, Software and Environmental Systems Design * Russ Rinfret, Mechanical Engineering Manager * Lee Follmer * Tim Jolly * Alex Barandian * Chris Wooley * Chris Spect * Carl Meske Supply and Vendor Mgmt * Jeff Galloway

Customers

On 14 July 2007, the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC) deployed a Sun MD containing 252

Sun Fire Fire is a series of server computers introduced in 2001 by Sun Microsystems (since 2010, part of Oracle Corporation). The Sun Fire branding coincided with the introduction of the UltraSPARC III processor, superseding the UltraSPARC II-ba ...

X2200 compute nodes as a compute farm. Other customers include Radboud University. In March 2009, the

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...

migrated its digital archive into a Sun MD, hosted at Sun's Santa Clara headquarters campus, a realization of a paper written by Archive employees in late 2003 proposing "an outdoor petabyte JBOD

NAS Nas (born 1973) is the stage name of American rapper Nasir Jones. Nas, NaS, or NAS may also refer to: Aviation * Nasair, a low-cost airline carrier and subsidiary based in Eritrea * National Air Services, an airline in Saudi Arabia ** Nas Air ( ...

box" of sufficient capacity to store the then-current Archive in a 40' shipping container.

References

External links

Sun Modular Datacenter S20 Product Library Documentation

Project Blackbox Blog
* {{Intermodal containers Sun Microsystems hardware Intermodal containers Data centers Modular datacenter

History

Customers

See also

References

External links