Intel Considering Portable Data Centers
It's been more than a year since Sun Microsystems (JAVAD) announced Project Blackbox, its container-based "data center in a box." We've been closely tracking developments with portable data centers, including the subsequent product announcements from Rackable (RACK). The concept has generated much interest and discussion, but deployment has thus far been limited to a Blackbox at Stanford and three ICE Cube customer shipments by Rackable.
This week there's evidence that one of the tech sector's biggest names is thinking portable. In a recent issue of its Premier IT magazine (via John Rath), Intel indicated that it is taking a serious look at deploying portable data centers in shipping containers. Here's a summary from Martin Menard, the director of Intel's Platform Capability Group:
The cost of building a new data center is extremely high — between $40 million and $60 million. As an alternative, we are considering placing high-density servers on racks in a container similar to those you see on container ships and trucks. We estimate that the same server capacity in this container solution will reduce facility costs by 30 percent to 50 percent versus a brick-and-mortar installation. Because it’s a small, contained environment, cooling costs are far less than for traditional data centers. Even if we build a warehouse-like structure to house the containers (thus addressing security and environmental concerns), the cost is dramatically less per square foot. In fact, the difference is so great that with this solution, brick-and-mortar data centers may become a thing of the past.Intel appears to still be in the "considering" mode and apparently hasn't baked portable data centers into its current data center consolidation. Microsoft engineers have also expressed interest in container-based data centers. Sun has announced a large-scale deployment of 30 Blackboxes for an underground data center in Japan, but that project will not be completed until mid-2010.
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By Rich Miller 
November 20, 2007 | Permalink | >Get Posts By E-mail
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