Sun's data center in a can: intriguing and impractical

In the movie Goodfellas, the New York mob makes off with millions of dollars in the famous Lufthansa heist. But instead of hijacking trucks, what if criminals could hitch up to your data center and haul it away? That could be a new security concern if IT organizations take to new, modular data centers as Sun's Project Blackbox.

The portable data center, mounted inside a 20-foot long steel shipping container, is ready to go with 35 racks that can hold up to 480 servers - just hook up power and hoses to supply chilled water. The units are designed to be shipped and even stacked in a parking lot. But how do you keep a data center in a steel box sitting on hot pavement cool?

With the doors closed. Racks sit back to back while chilled air rotates around them in a circular fashion as opposed to the traditional hot aisle/cold aisle design - an unusual airflow strategy the company calls "cyclonic cooling." The system is designed to operate as a sealed box with no staff inside. The cargo container is the computer. This tracks with industry repositioning of the data center as the new computer.

That idea came about because high density computing systems now generate so much heat that the impact on the the room is as important as keeping the racks themselves cooled. Sun has long stated that the network is the computer. Now with Project Blackbox, the container is the computer. In this thinking vendors are several steps ahead of data center managers, who are trying to make these systems work in existing racks in data centers using cooling and power delivery systems that may have been designed 5, 10 or 15 years ago.

Sun isn't the first to market with such an idea. American Power Conversion unveiled InfraStruXure Express, a portable data center in a tractor trailer rig, about a year ago. That unit, which businesses can rent, can roll into a parking lot and be up and running within a few hours.

While such products are interesting and likely to produce good publicity, it's hard to see how such a niche product will add significantly to Sun or APC's bottom line. Practically speaking, data center managers are more concerned about getting the most from the data centers they already have. They would much rather see innovations in the energy efficiency of IT equipment and better ways to distribute power and dissipate heat in existing data centers.

Today I'm at Liebert's Adaptive Exchange conference where I'll be trying to nail down a panel of experts from Dell, IBM, Sun, HP, Intel and Liebert to get some answers. I'll be asking where they think high density computing is heading and how they expect data center managers to deal with 30 40 or 50KW racks.