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Sun Modular Datacenter

Portable data center built into a 20-foot shipping container

A Sun Modular Datacenter on display at the Sun Microsystems Executive Briefing Center in [[Menlo Park, California

Sun Modular Datacenter (Sun MD, known in the prototype phase as Project Blackbox) is a portable data center built into a standard 20-foot intermodal container (shipping container), manufactured and marketed by Sun Microsystems (acquired in 2010 by Oracle Corporation). A data center of up to 280 servers could be rapidly deployed using existing standardized transport methods to locations that might not be suitable for a building or other structure, and connecting it to the required infrastructure (including an external chiller and power source). Sun stated that the system could be made operational for 1% of the cost of building a traditional data center.

History

The goal, as conceived by Greg Papadopoulos and Dave Douglas from Sun Labs and Danny Hillis from Applied Minds, was to design the largest possible "thumb drive" that could still be easily transported worldwide by truck, rail, or air. Since intermodal container transportation infrastructure exists in nearly every country, their answer was a 20-foot standard shipping container, modified to support eight 40RU compute racks populated with servers, storage, and other equipment. The initial target markets included secure portable data centers, and disaster relief to allow Internet access for email and insurance forms.

The prototype build was hosted at the Applied Minds facility, managed by Adam Yates from Applied Minds and Russ Rinfret from Sun. The prototype was first announced as "Project Blackbox" in October 2006; a Project Blackbox with 1088 AMD Opteron processors ranked #412 on the June 2007 TOP500 list.{{cite web |access-date = 2013-06-08 |url-status = dead |archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20080803011807/http://top500.org/site/history/2827 |archive-date = 2008-08-03

Team

Marketing

Darlene Yaplee, senior director
Michael Bohlig, marketing lead
Cheryl Martin, marketing lead
Bob Schilmoeller, technical marketing
Joe Carvalho, technical marketing

Engineering

Jud Cooley, senior director for the project
Chuck Perry, software and environmental systems design lead
Russ Rinfret, mechanical engineering manager
Lee Follmer, mechanical engineering lead
Tim Jolly, mechanical engineer
Alex Barandian, mechanical engineer
Chris Wooley, mechanical engineer
Chris Spect, mechanical engineer
Carl Meske, software and environmental systems engineer
Jeff Galloway, supply and vendor management

Customers

On 14 July 2007, the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory deployed a Sun MD containing 252 Sun Fire X2200 compute nodes as a compute farm.

In March 2009, the Internet Archive 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 box" of sufficient capacity to store the then-current Archive in a 40' shipping container.{{cite web |access-date = 2013-06-08 |url-status = dead |archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20130914070015/http://www.baumgart.org/petabytebox.pdf |archive-date = 2013-09-14

Other customers included Radboud University.{{cite news |access-date = 2013-06-08 |url-status = dead |archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20080605190702/http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/Jan/29/sun_rebrands_blackbox_as_sun_md.html |archive-date = 2008-06-05

References

(2008-05-27). "Sun Modular Datacenter S20 - Technical Specifications".
M. Mitchell Waldrop - "Data Center In a Box", ''Scientific American'', August 2007
(2006-10-17). "Sun Unveils The Future of Virtualized Datacenters – Project Blackbox". Sun Microsystems, Inc..
(2008-01-29). "Sun Modular Datacenter Fuels Momentum With New Customer Wins In Manufacturing, Healthcare, HPC and Telco". Sun Microsystems.
(2007-06-20). "SLAC Prepares for First Blackbox to Expand Computing Power". SLAC Today.
(2007-07-25). "SLAC's Newest Computing Center Arrives... by Truck". SLAC Today.
(2009-03-25). "Internet Archive and Sun Microsystems Create Living History of the Internet". [[Sun Microsystems]].

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