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Published on October 9, 2007

Cheryl Martin, senior director of business development at Sun Microsystems, said Project Blackbox is the first virtualised data centre in the world, which aims to combine innovative network computing infrastructure and grid computing expertise to reduce data-centre complexity and costs, reduce time to deployment and deliver all the power and capacity of traditional data centres.

The Blackbox is located in a standard 20-foot shipping container that comes with power and capacity to rank among the top 200 supercomputers in the world. It can be deployed any time and anywhere. It can deliver 146 teraflops, provide more than 2 petabytes of storage, 7 terabytes of memory, hold up to 1,000 x 64 cores and be globally available nearly instantaneously for one-tenth of the price of a traditional data centre. It is packaged with eight standard racks, high efficiency power and cooling up to 25kW per rack. It has a footprint one-eighth the size of a typical data centre for the same workload and four-times greater capacity per rack.

"The Project Blackbox delivers all the power and capacity of a traditional data centre. It offers three times more power with 20 to 40 per cent more efficient cooling and power use," said Martin.

The Blackbox supports up to 10,000 simultaneous desktop users without PC administrators. It also provides instant-on expansion and deployment opportunities for any organisation wanting to move away from the rigidity of a legacy data centre. It integrates sensors, alarms and global positioning system (GPS).

She said Project Blackbox is an ideal product for data-centre expansion. For instance, a company headquartered in a large metropolitan area can easily augment its data centre with containers located in a secure warehouse, on a rooftop, in a parking garage, or in a neighbouring town with more abundant, cheaper real estate.

The firm focuses on selling the Project Blackbox in four business areas including augmentation for data-centre expansion and consolidation, interim and temporary use for disaster recovery, specialised disaster relief for government and military, and oil and gas and large scale network services and application service providers.

She said the firm was launching Project Blackbox in Singapore as the first country in Asia-Pacific.

It plans to launch it in China, Korea, India and Japan as the next step.

The firm now has two early access customers - Stanford Linear Accelerator Centre which will utilise the high-performance computing node for high-energy physics and particle astrophysics research, and Mobile TeleSystems in Russia to distribute modular billing nodes.

Gartner Research has estimated that by 2008, 50 per cent of current data centres will have insufficient power and cooling capacity to meet the demands of high-density equipment.

 Jirapan Boonnoon

The Nation

Singapore