Data centre in a box

Sun's new 'data centre in a container' is certainly innovative. But what are the real benefits? And who could use such a set-up? Quocirca's Dennis Szubert explains.

Remember the first portable computers in the 1970s and 1980s? More luggable than portable, they weighed at least 13kg and you needed to be built like Arnold Schwarzenegger to carry one. But they represented a real breakthrough at the time.

Wind forward 30 years and you know real progress has been made when you find yourself talking about portable data centres. Sun for instance has recently unveiled Project Blackbox - a shock-mounted, fully contained, lights-out data centre in a standard 20-foot shipping container.

It's not exactly portable but it is at least transportable. The transport systems of the world have been built around the universal form factor of the container, so there will be no problem moving this baby by ship, truck, train or even heavy-lift helicopter.

Data centres everywhere

Data centres are becoming more innovative and 'green'. See photos of some of the latest:

♦ Photos: The data centre in a shipping container
♦ Photos: IBM's flat pack data centre

Inside, eight industry-standard 19-inch, 42-unit racks run down either side of the structurally upgraded container, which is supported by a state-of-the-art cooling system to allow for a very high server density. A slide mechanism or dolly allows racks to be pulled out into a central service aisle for maintenance with the overhead cabling still attached, providing both front and back access while the unit is still running.

The tightly integrated cooling units positioned between each rack contain water-cooled heat exchangers (to cool the hot air before it enters the next rack) and fans (to move the air around the container in a closed loop). Air flows up one side, passing through each rack and cooler unit in turn and back down the opposite side. At either end a plenum formed by the gap between inner and outer doors completes the circuit. As the racks are turned sideways (instead of facing out toward the aisle) the airflow through the servers is in the conventional front-to-back direction they are designed for.

A novel shock absorption system under the racks (a row of steel cable loops down each side) and a similar one on top allows transportation by standard shipping methods. The container can withstand a six-foot drop onto concrete without damage to the content, and has been earthquake-tested up to magnitude R6.7.

Each container can hold up to 250 Sun T1000 servers (with 2,000 cores and 8,000 simultaneous threads) or it can be filled with 1.5 petabytes of disk or 2 petabytes of tape. Fill it with high-performance gear and one of these boxes would be in the top 200 supercomputer centres in the world.

The payload does not have to be Sun hardware - there is nothing to stop you filling the racks with gear from competing vendors as long as it fits within the 200 kilowatts power and cooling limit of the box. However, Sun offers a discount on the approximately €500,000 price tag if you fill it with Sun servers, and for a price they will even build it out for you prior to delivery.

The numbers Sun gives are impressive - five per cent of the size, deploy in one tenth the time, 20 per cent more power efficient and 20 per cent more effective cooling when compared to a conventional data centre - although they don't all seem to add up.

For instance the company claims the data centre has "three times the computing power for equivalent space" but that does not seem to square with five per cent of the size. It also says the centre is "deployable in one-tenth the time it would take to design, build and deploy a conventional data centre" but that does not exactly equate to delivering, turning-on and configuring it in less than a day. Go figure.

So who wants a back-of-a-truck data centre? An obvious use that springs to mind is in field deployments such as in catastrophe areas for humanitarian aid or for military use in theatres of operation.

To set it up, just find a reasonably flat spot, hook up power, water and network connections, turn it on and configure it. Of course it is slightly more complicated than that - you need a three-phase power supply or else a generator, and a two-inch water feed supplying up to 60 gallons a minute, cooled to 13 degrees Celsius (a 60-ton chiller unit should take care of it).

Other possibilities include remote sites that need local processing power such as high-performance computing for seismic modelling on an oil rig, or simulating fluid load on supertankers. Companies that want a temporary solution because they know they will be moving facilities in a few years may also be attracted to the 'build once, deploy anywhere' approach.

Apart form mobility, there are other advantages:

Size. Companies headquartered in large metropolitan centres such as Honk Kong, London and New York typically are space constrained. To them the compact size of these boxes and their ability to stack would be attractive. Placing them on the rooftop of their building might be a good way to make the most of a scarce resource.

Speed of deployment. Rapidly growing companies that cannot build data centre space fast enough to keep up with demand could use a Project Blackbox solution.

Price and flexibility. Just starting out on the data centre path? At one-hundredth of the initial outlay, this modular system could allow growing companies to add capacity as they need it. It could also provide a low-cost disaster recovery site, perhaps situated in a secured warehouse where land is less expensive.

Power and cooling. If you are crippled by data centre energy and space constraints, that 20 per cent efficiency improvement could provide relief.

The Sun marketing blurb for the data centre shows a black container (they will actually be painted white in production to help with cooling) squeezed between pillars in a basement car park and dumped in the middle of a field next to a wind-turbine.

In reality you would want to put it somewhere out of reach of neighbourhood hooligans who may be tempted to cut the network connections, turn off the water chiller, break in and trash it, pour petrol over it and set it on fire - the possibilities are almost endless, including having a gang with a truck jack your entire data centre.

But if Blackbox really catches on, could it become a universal form-factor for data centres? Imagine hosting companies that host your data centres instead of your servers. They could provide chilled water, power and networking in a secure warehouse where you could 'dock' your data centre. Now that's an interesting thought.

If nothing else, Sun may have brought the day closer when you get approached in a pub with the proposition: "Hey, wanna buy a data centre? Fell off the back of a truck mate."