Sun nails four buyers in 15 months with White Trash Data Center
COPS: Silicon Valley
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Sun Microsystems has spent of lot of time insisting that customers actually want to buy some of its white trash, trailerized data centers. And now the company has a press release to back up its insistiation.
The lone, public customer for the Sun Modular Datacenter - aka "Project Blackbox," aka "We'll see you in the Silicon Valley episode of COPS - to date had been the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). It would seem that SLAC loves its data center so much that it ordered a second unit. And, get this, Hansen Transmissions, Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre (UMCN) and Mobile TeleSystems OJSC (MTS) have all bought boxes as well.
So, er, we now know Sun has sold at least five Modular Datacenters (MDs) since it unveiled the system in Oct. 2006.
If our hilarious jabs didn't make it clear, Sun has crafted a complete data center that makes its way to customers in a standard shipping container. You can pick and choose the amount of servers and storage you'd like. Sun then bundles that together, runs some cooling through the unit, paints it whatever color you like, throws in a wife beater and mails off the system, which is more or less a supercomputer equivalent unit.
Sun and Rackable Systems have led the charge around this idea, believing that customers tight on data center space or in need of lots of computing real fast will buy the gear. Basically, you plunk a data center down in your parking lot or at a remote site - anywhere really so long as it has access to power and water.
The Sun system starts at more than $500,000.
Sun insiders claim that they've sold a lot more Sun MDs than they can talk about out loud. For example, government customers - one of the target markets - don't like to talk about their purchases. And many companies prefer to keep their IT buys secret as well.
Have you seen a Sun MD in your parking lot? Send us a photo. Anonymity assured. ®
COMMENTS
Bruce Willis already wrecked one...
See "Live Free or Die Harder" - the hackers had one of these for their HQ...
Goes to show the baddies are always one step ahead...
"It's a frigging hammer."
You guys are bloody nuts. "Wifebeater" means exactly what it sounds like- a married individual that beats their wife. This is very common among so-called "white trash", which is why it was part of the joke in this article.
PG&E example is stupid
How many supercomputer/HPC clusters run at 10% utilization?
Even if there are occasional times when a cluster is at 10% utilization, virtulization won't give it the resources it needs when it has to be run at 100% utilization.

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