Will A Blackbox Survive An Earthquake?

CEO Jonathan Schwartz reports strong interest in Project Blackbox, Sun’s containerized data center. “Our view is Project Blackbox, and fail-in-place software infrastructure like the free ZFS file system, represent real options for CIO’s and CTO’s out of space, power, money or patience,” Schwartz writes.

As it moves closer to commercial sales of the Blackbox, it looks like Sun wants to address some of the tough questions from potential customers. For instance: how would a Blackbox fare in an earthquake? “We put a blackbox on one of the world’s largest shake tables at University of California, San Diego, to get a sense for how it’d handle a severe earthquake,” Schwartz reports. “Rather than ‘shake and bake’ a computer, we figured we’d test out the equivalent for a complete datacenter.” The company videotaped the test and posted it on YouTube:

You can read more on Jonathan’s blog.

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About Rich Miller

Rich Miller is the founder and editor-in-chief of Data Center Knowledge, and has been reporting on the data center sector since 2000. He has tracked the growing impact of high-density computing on the power and cooling of data centers, and the resulting push for improved energy efficiency in these facilities.