Sun upbeat over Blackbox adoption

Vendor claims datacentre in a shipping container is stoking customer interest

Sun Microsystems has revealed it is in talks with several European firms about deploying its new Project Blackbox " datacentre in a box", including a major airline, a global telco and a government department.

Speaking at a demonstration of the mobile datacentre in West London today, Vice president for Project Blackbox Darlene Yuplee, said the company was in " intense discussions" ahead of the products full launch in the summer.

Sun claims that its design for an optimised datacentre installed in a standard 20 foot shipping container means that firms can deploy a working datacentre in one tenth of the time it would take to set up a traditional datacentre, making it ideal for organisations that are struggling to add capacity to their existing overcrowded and over heating datacentres.

Yuplee added that the concept was also well suited to organisations that need to set up datacentres quickly in potentially remote locations, such as the military or the oil industry, and provides a means of firms relocating their datacentre operations to regions with lower electricity bills.

The new product also boasts considerable green credentials, according to Sun, as the optimised layout and water cooling system mean that the infrastructure is 20 percent more energy efficient than an equivalent permanent datacentre.

Richard Barrington, head of sustainability at Sun Microsystems in the UK, said that the company was seeing particularly strong demand from firms keen to use the box as a temporary means of providing computing capacity while they upgrade their existing datacentres or carry out server consolidation projects.

"A lot of companies are interested in the design as a means of providing swing space during datacentre projects," he said. "So we're happy to just rent them the box for the length of the project."

He also revealed that with only four Blackboxes in operation and five under construction Sun is in talks with several service providers about them building mobile datacentres following Sun's designs. "There are a number of companies looking at an OEM agreement for the Blackbox," said Barrington. "We'd just give them the blueprint and they could get on with it."