Monday June 25, 2007

We have a Blackbox here in Dresden (shown above) and it has been a popular tour for the Sun customers and partners attending the Sun HPC Consortium meeting. We also had a talk about Project Blackbox, delivered by Robert Zwickenpflug of Sun Microsystems GmbH. For those not familiar, Blackbox is a datacenter in a box--specifically, a datacenter built into a standard 20' shipping container.

Robert reviewed the Blackbox specs--that it supports up to 266 rack units of equipment in a total of eight 19" racks in about 160 square feet. Depending on the CPU used, one could fit 500 CPUs or 2000 cores or 8000 threads in a single Blackbox container or perhaps 1.5 petabytes of storage. A Blackbox system can handle about 200 kW of power and cooling due to its innovative water-cooled design. Both Sun and 3rd party components may be installed.

We figure a Blackbox can be deployed in 1/10 the time of a traditional datacenter (conservatively), that it is about 20% more energy efficient than an AC-cooled datacenter, and that one could save perhaps $150K per year by locating a Blackbox close to low-cost power sources (possible due to its mobile nature and based on estimated energy costs of $0.25/kWh in an urban environment versus a $0.03/kWh rural rate.)