Microsoft, Google: Blackbox Customers?

Fast Company has a profile of Sun Microsystems which discusses Project Blackbox, Sun’s innovative “data center in a box,” as CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s “biggest initiative to date, and the one that best reflects his vision for the new Sun.” For those who’ve been tracking the Blackbox story, the most interesting item in the Fast Company story is a brief discussion of potential customers:

Sun is closemouthed about prelaunch buyers. Gartner’s (Laura) McLellan says that she and her colleagues are “almost entirely convinced” that Sun has been building Blackboxes for Google. (Google, notoriously secretive about its technology, won’t comment.) Silicon Valley is buzzing that Microsoft may be a customer–or be building something similar. James Hamilton, a technologist on Microsoft’s Windows Live team, said this spring that portable data centers in shipping containers were “an idea whose time has come” and could create “a competitive advantage.”

The idea that the Blackbox may be connected to Robert Cringley’s 2005 column about a containerized data center at Google ^[1] is not new (we suggested as much upon the launch of the Blackbox ^[2]. Speculating about Microsoft’s interest is a layup as well after Hamilton’s public embrace of the portable data center ^[3] concept. For what it’s worth, Hamilton’s research discussed Rackable’s Concentro ^[4] offering, a Blackbox competitor in a 40-foot “form factor,” as well as the 20-feet container approach used by the Blackbox.

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URL to article: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2007/05/19/microsoft-google-blackbox-customers/

URLs in this post:

[1] 2005 column about a containerized data center at Google: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2005/pulpit_20051117_000873.html

[2] launch of the Blackbox: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2006/Oct/17/sun_unveils_data_center_in_a_box.html

[3] portable data center: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2007/Apr/05/microsoft_mulling_portable_data_centers.html

[4] Rackable’s Concentro: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2007/Mar/30/rackable_selling_portable_data_center.html

[5] Rich Miller: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/author/richm/

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