by Recently, Sun announced an initiative called Project Blackbox. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s something they call a “virtual data center”. But, it’s real and physical. You can touch it, hear it, move it, and … as the Sun guy said, taste it if you like. (Personally, I wouldn’t, I don’t know where that datacenter has been).
Blackbox is a shippable mini data center. They take a 20 foot steel shipping container, stuff eight racks into it with hookups for 3-phase power, networking, and water pipes. You can use up to seven of those racks for computing equipment for a total of 250 standard rack U of space (just think, that’s up to 1000 Opteron cores in that footprint). The eighth rack is retained for networking and miscellaneous environmental equipment (monitoring and dehumidification it seems).
Well, Sun pulled one up to the office today to kick off a tour of the US in which they show this thing off. These are my impressions (they’re a little scatterbrained, sorry)
First, very interesting idea. They’re targetting a market where you need immediate data center expansion but have no physical room to build out more data center space. Imagine adding 250 additional systems to your environment by just having a container dropped off on your lot or in your parking garage. Just add facilities. They’re also targetting this thing for emerging nations or for disaster recovery solutions. Plop down a container in the middle of Africa or the middle of a disaster and have instant infrastructure.
Don’t have power or cooling taps? No problem. In a second 20′ container, they can ship you a chiller and generator. Nice and contained way to hook these two things together.
I’m not sure I like the way they’ve laid the thing out internally. You have your eight racks placed inside this container, four to a side. The racks are positioned front to back with cooling modules in front of each rack. Can’t picture it? Imagine this: airflow-> [c][FB][c][FB][c][FB][c][FB][hepa]->air out. [c] is a cooling unit (copper pipes and aluminum fins; basically a big heat exchanger with chilled water running through it). [FB] is the rack; F for front, B for back. [hepa] is a set of HEPA filters on one end to help reduce dust flowing through the entire unit. They position all this in such a way that air flows in a circular pattern once the container is closed up. To keep the environment nice and happy, there’s an internal door, much like a big freezer door, on each end of the container that sits inside the big steel doors. I had concerns about what happens to the environment when you have to crack the inner door open and disrupt the flow of air. You can sorta see what I’m talking about in this photo..
Ok, so you have your racks tucked in behind these units, how do you get to your equipment? Well, they have this dolly that you slip up under the rack, smash a lever down, lifting up the entire thing. The dolly lets you pull the rack out so you can work on the equipment in your access isle. Need to get at both the back AND the front of the rack? Be patient: you either need to walk outside of the container to the back door or work on the front of the rack, push the rack in, walk behind, pull the rack out, work on the back. It’d be good exercise atleast. They claim that moving the rack isn’t all that difficult; I didn’t get a chance to try. All the networking and power for that rack is attached to some sort of moveable cable management try. Oh, and each rack stands on top of these rings of thick steel cabling for shock absorbtion.
They claim you can drop the entire container from a height of six inches and have everything inside still continue to be safe and sound. The drop causes no more than 9G’s of force when it hits the ground. I asked if they’d tested it out and (surprisingly), they had.
Ok, so you have this thing safely delivered, gingerly set on level ground, and you quickly hookup your power and chilled water piping. The unit can take up to two 600A, 208V 3-phase connections to provide redundent power to every piece of equipment you stuff in the box. A full container can support up to 25kVA per rack and would require ~60 tons of chilled water supply. The one downside I see to the cooling is that there’s only one water loop in the entire system, so if your chilled water supply is interrupted, you’ll end up cooking your systems pretty quickly (I think it’s something like 7 seconds at 25kVA according to the Uptime Institute). But don’t worry: the container is filled with all sorts of monitoring sensors and an EPO system to help save the contents in time of need. Heck, they’ve even thought about a moisture alarm down by the drain for the dehumidifier (I did point out that they needed one on the other side of the small overflow area they built because the dehumidifier’s drain tube extended outside that).
You can stack these containers six high, so you can get them pretty dense. Unfortunately, the version we looked at would have made that nonsensical. Sure, you could stack them that high, but you couldn’t stack anything next to them. The placing of the power, water, and network taps were on the sides of the containers making it look difficult to do any sort of arrangement that required them close together (you’d need room on the sides to access all the fittings, have room for maintenance, etc).
Overall, I think it was an interesting and possibly quite useful tool, especially when you’re looking at it in terms of disaster recovery, small, directed expansion, or quick facilities setup in emerging technological areas.
If you get a chance to see one of these things, do check it out. They’re a pretty noval concept.