Stanford center turns to Sun Blackbox for extra capacity
When the Stanford Linear
Accelerator Center wanted to increase its computing capacity last year it
considered a satellite datacenter or an extension to the existing building,
but in the end it chose a faster and more novel approach: it ordered a datacenter
in a box.
The center, which does high-energy physics research for the U.S.
Department of Energy, was one of the first customers for Sun Microsystems'
Project
Blackbox, which takes standard shipping containers 20 feet by 8 feet by
8 feet (6.1m x 2.4m x 2.4m) and turns them into mini datacenters that can be
delivered and operational in a few weeks, according to Sun.
SLAC's Blackbox was delivered in July last year and was up and running by September.
Aside from a few challenges -- like figuring out how to service the unit when
it's raining -- the center is pleased with its choice and in the process of
installing a second unit.
It is one of four customers that Sun identified Tuesday to illustrate momentum
for Project Blackbox. It also renamed the product the Sun Modular Datacenter,
or Sun MD. The boxes start at US$559,000 without the "payload," or
the computers inside, and Sun will ship them around the world for an extra fee.
Delivery to Amsterdam by air, for example, costs about $15,000.
SLAC turned to Project Blackbox because it needed to expand its compute capacity
fairly quickly. "The datacenter here was at its capacity, especially in
terms of the electrical service to the building and the amount of heat we could
take back out. And the experiments needed their next year's worth of computing,"
said Chuck Boeheim, SLAC's assistant director of computing services.
Modifying its existing datacenter to accommodate another major electrical feed
and "chiller plant" would have taken one to two years and cost several
million dollars. "We also looked at doing a satellite datacenter in a smaller
building, but with the approvals and lead time that was a couple of years out
as well. Blackbox was something we could do very quickly," Boeheim said.
The raw shipping containers are customized by a subcontractor, and Sun typically
installs the payload before delivery. SLAC's Blackbox arrived on a flat-bed
truck last July, fitted with 252 Sun Fire X2200 rack-mount servers, the same
type it uses in its datacenter. Sun had also wired the servers to a Cisco Catalyst
6509 switch that SLAC provided before delivery.
Boeheim described the process in a white
paper on his Web site, along with photos and time-lapse videos that show
the box being hoisted into place by a crane.
Customers can put other vendors' hardware in the unit, but
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