Global Architect for Project Blackbox - Joe Carvalho

Joe is the type of person that would snip a small 1" square piece of the container cover material for the tour, stick it in a microwave for 5 minutes, and test if it was warm in order to determine whether or not the cover for the tour was conductive. Oh, wait, Joe is the person who did that.

In an order to keep things fresh, a sprinkling of blog interviews are on tap! Take it from me, I'm not a reporter, I'm not a marketer, and I'm certainly not good at making up earth shattering questions like "If you were a tree...". Nonetheless, Project Blackbox is very real in Sun Microsystems and each of has a different reason why we're excited to be a part of the team.

Here is a picture of Joe on tour with Project Blackbox in Washington D.C..

Here is my very informal interview with Joe that I conducted this weekend over email!

Joe, what is your role with Project Blackbox?
They call me a "Global Architect". I handle all sorts of questions / ideas / solutions from customers and marketing/sales people regarding the implementation and deployment of Project Blackbox.

Project Blackbox as a whole is innovative, what do you see as the most intriguing physical aspect of Project Blackbox?
It's about as cool a datacenter solution as you can get. When you're inside the Project Blackbox and close your eyes, it's just like being in huge brick/mortar datacenter. Computers don't care what their housing facility looks like, why should I?! As long as the power is clean, the cooling is adequate, and the network speed and bandwidth of sufficient quantity, my blade servers are happy as proverbial clams.

There are many uses being proposed for Project Blackbox, from disaster
relief operations to modular expansion of data centers. Do you have
particular scenario in mind that would be one of the "sweet spots" for
Project Blackbox?
Next to food, water, and unbridled freedom, I'm all for computing for the masses. Google, YouTube, *pedia, have become the mainstay of researchers and collaborationists. Bringing those resources to the common man isn't free. Putting Project Blackbox into areas of inexpensive real estate and power should bring the cost of running those services affordable enough to allow corps to still make a profit, yet allow for 'free cpu cycles for one and all'...yeah, it's a big pie in the sky.

You met up with the Project Blackbox tour in Washington D.C., what type of customer reaction did you see?
The majority felt the same way I do, to the question: "So, what do you think about Project Blackbox?"
Fantastic!
It's real!
It really does exist and you have equipment running in it?!
When can I get x of them?
Awesome!
Not one person said anything negative. There were suggestions for improving the hostile environment characteristics of it, but nothing to lead me to believe this is a bad/poor/half-baked product.

While discussing the project with folks that were touring, what were
they particularly excited about?
"Rapid deployment for their growing needs." It's nice to see an immediate gratification solution being applied to a data center. To quote a famous poet, "I want it all and I want it now: Freddie Mercury"

Lots of different customers came through the Project Blackbox. Aside from the usual political interests, the DOD, research and academia folks were there in force. I wish there were 10x of me there to field all the questions and interest in the Project Blackbox. Entities want them and they want them now/yesterday. Folks are out of space in their existing data centers, they want to buy new equipment and they want to deploy their older gear into the Project Blackbox, they want to try out a Dr Cob(Disaster recovery and continuation of business), they want to free up space for manufacturing equipment and put the computers out in the parking lot or on the top of their parking garages or buildings.

What is the most common question (and your answer) that you get from
customers about Project Blackbox?
Does it have to be black with a Sun logo? No, black looks techsexy with the eco green lettering. For the most part, they'll ship with a white exterior finish. Some folks even asked if we could ding/dent up the outside and finish it in rust/primer.

How would you configure your own shipping container if Sun were to give you one with a blank check to populate all 8 racks of equipment?
Hmmm... I'd go 50:50 of compute resources and communications equipment and sufficient infrastructure goo to stick it all together. I'm not a big fan of radio smog, but I don't want to depend on terrestrial pipes to carry my messages along. More than one errant backhoe has taken down a data center. It's easy to link to additional compute resources if you have a means to communicate with them.

And thus ends, my first blog interview. I hope you enjoyed it and lets see who I can spring a few questions on next time...

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