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Blackbox Challenge - What is your best idea?

Thursday Oct 26, 2006

Let your imagination run wild.... 8 racks: any mix of Sun's servers, storage, tape, etc. plus any mix of network gear and other. Enough cooling for 200kW (25kW per rack). What would you put in a Sun Blackbox?

Several places Sun has talked about 7 racks of computing and one for networking, but what are your thoughts what your most imaginative mix of stuff in 8 racks?

Webservering?
Supercomputer?
Database plus SAP Application Tier?
Database engine plus Java Application Tier?
...etc

or what would you put in multiple containers?

Post your ideas in comments...

[7] Comments

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Posted at 07:07AM Oct 26, 2006 in Blackbox
Tags: application blackbox sap webserving

Comments:

Here is some refinement of ideas:

Webserving Tier in a Blackbox

250 T1000's and the proper network gear

Sunray serving Tier in a Blackbox

100 T2000s and the proper network gear
US-IV+ servers in racks for database
US-IV+ servers in racks Application servers

SAP Application and database serving in a Blackbox

US-IV+ servers in racks for database
T2000 servers in racks Application servers
US-IV+ servers in racks Application servers

HPC Supercomputing in a Blackbox

Sun Fire X2200 servers
Infiniband switches

Posted by BM Seer on October 26, 2006 at 09:51 AM PDT #

Thumper for database?

Posted by Nico on October 26, 2006 at 10:32 AM PDT #

Yes Thumper for databases.

How about portable Formula1 FluidDyanmics simulator and tuner for Race days? Part of container for CFD simulations, part for data logging, part for ?

...other blue sky ideas? have fun?

Posted by BM Seer on October 26, 2006 at 02:14 PM PDT #

Think portable "stack-in-a-box" for regularly occuring heavy processing jobs. Eg, for large companies, doing processing on data-warehousing applications on financial and product data, at the end of a quarter, or end of their financial year.

Send over a Blackbox configured with the required (parallel) database application. Get to location - copy over data, do 1-2 weeks of processing, then leave at the end - purging the data first.

This way, the customer can have a local, fully controllable "peak load datacenter" - and only pay when they need it, rather than having unused capacity hanging around.

Posted by Chris Rijk on October 26, 2006 at 04:30 PM PDT #

Cool!

Posted by BM Seer on October 26, 2006 at 04:54 PM PDT #

On the outside a coin slot and a touchscreen please.

Posted by Tom on October 26, 2006 at 05:09 PM PDT #

Wouldn't a coin slot, wifi controller connections, and projector, and placing it in a refurbed driven theater be quite a video game arcade...

Posted by BM Seer on October 30, 2006 at 05:25 PM PST #