Sun Modular Datacenter


Sun Modular Datacenter is a portable data center built into a standard 20-foot intermodal container manufactured and marketed by Sun Microsystems. An external chiller and power were required for the operation of a Sun MD. A data center of up to 280 servers could be rapidly deployed by shipping the container in a regular way to locations that might not be suitable for a building or another structure, and connecting it to the required infrastructure. Sun stated that the system could be made operational for 1% of the cost of building a traditional data center.

History

The prototype was first announced as "Project Blackbox" in October 2006; the official product was announced in January 2008.
A Project Blackbox with 1088 Advanced Micro Devices Opteron processors ranked #412 on the June 2007 TOP500 list.

Customers

On 14 July 2007, the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory deployed a Sun MD containing 252 Sun Fire X2200 compute nodes as a compute farm. Other customers include Radboud University.
In March 2009, the Internet Archive migrated its digital archive into a Sun MD, hosted at Sun's Santa Clara headquarters campus, a realization of a paper written by Archive employees in late 2003 proposing "an outdoor petabyte JBOD NAS box" of sufficient capacity to store the then-current Archive in a 40' shipping container.