Photos: The data centre in a shipping container

Sun Microsystems will launch a data centre in a shipping container this summer which it claims is greener and cheaper than an average set-up.

The 'Blackbox' virtualised database container will cost around €500,000 when it comes out in July in the UK and Sun claims it is 20 per cent more energy efficient than a traditional air-con cooled data centre.

Richard Barrington, head of corporate affairs and public policy at Sun Microsystems, said the Blackbox is capable of better than 20 per cent power savings if more energy efficient servers are used.

Barrington added a standard UK data centre costs around £75m to build and open so for customers wanting to expand their IT architecture without forking out millions of pounds the Blackbox offers an affordable alternative.

Sun claims the Blackbox can be deployed in one-tenth of the time it takes to design, build and deploy a traditional data centre.

The 20 foot by eight foot container (pictured) weighs 9,000kg and can provide 1.5 million gigabytes of disk storage and hold up to 250 Sun Fire CoolThreads T1000 servers.

Photo credit: Gemma Simpson