Blackbox on a Shake Table

We're continuing to see a lot of interest in Project Blackbox - a complete datacenter we're introducing to allow customers to leave behind traditional raised floor facilities for vastly less expensive, more power efficient and faster to deploy alternatives.

With network equipment increasingly managed via technology, not people, and service operators assuming individual components and machines will fail but a web service never can ('reliable services built from unreliable parts'), our view is Project Blackbox, and fail-in-place software infrastructure like the free ZFS file system, represent real options for CIO's and CTO's out of space, power, money or patience.

We put a blackbox on one of the world's largest shake tables at University of California, San Diego, to get a sense for how it'd handle a severe earthquake. Rather than "shake and bake" a computer, we figured we'd test out the equivalent for a complete datacenter (and throw some Sun SPOT sensors into the mix to harvest data):

For those interested in our blades launch event last week, at which John Fowler and Andy Bechtolsheim unveiled our first Intel product, a blade designed for our AMD/Intel/SPARC Sun Blade 6000, please see here. There's more data, here, as well (and yes, they'll run Windows, Linux and Solaris - all under the same management software, and they'll even fit in a Blackbox...).

And if you carefully watch Chapter 3 of the launch video, you'll see John and Andy provide a sneak peek for a project internally code-named "C48" - it's behind the big black drape...

Posted on 12:06PM Jun 10, 2007 | Comments[24]

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