Sun Modular Datacenter

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.

[5] The Sun Modular Datacenter, aka: Project Blackbox, was a concept design between MIT alums, Greg Papadopoulos and Dave Douglas from Sun Labs and Danny Hillis from Applied Minds to determine what is the largest possible “thumb drive” that can still be easily transported worldwide by truck, rail, and air.

Their decision was a 20 foot standard shipping container would be ideal as transportation methods exist in near every country around the world.

Initial target audience was for secure portable DC and for disaster relief to allow internet access for email and insurance forms.

The team behind Project Blackbox: Marketing Engineering Supply and Vendor Mgmt On 14 July 2007, the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC) deployed a Sun MD containing 252 Sun Fire X2200 compute nodes as a compute farm.