Will Investors Press Sun to Make a Deal?

Could investors force Sun Microsystems (JAVA) to seek an acquirer or sell off units? That’s not a new speculation, but one that’s examined at length in a Reuters story yesterday, in which investment bankers say that “the challenge of valuing Sun’s intertwined software, hardware and services businesses could put off potential buyers” such as rivals HP, IBM and Dell.

The hook for the Reuters story notes is the news last month that investment firm Southeastern Asset Management has increased its stake in Sun to 21 percent and said in an SEC filing that it ““will have additional conversations with management and/or third parties, regarding opportunities to maximize the value of the company.”

What’s likely to happen? The Reuters analysis concludes that it might be easier to sell of a unit, such as StorageTek, than find an acquirer interested in buying all of Sun. But Reuters also acknowledges that some of its sources are investment bankers who might benefit from asset sales.

Sun Rolls Out Data Center Design Services

Sun Microsystems (JAVA) has joined the growing crowd of companies providing data center design services to help companies improve the energy efficiency of their facilities. Sun today launched consulting services to help customers retrofit existing data centers and design new ones.

Sun is offering the consolidation of its own data center network into a state-of-the-art facility on its Santa Clara campus as a template for the process, which also may feature the use its Sun MD (Blackbox) data center container as a rapid expansion strategy for companies that have run out of space.

Sun is entering a field that has been a key focus for rivals IBM and HP, as well as many established specialists in mission-critical engineering. Data center design/build services have been a central thrust of IBM’s Project Big Green,  which has seen IBM build more than 40 customer data centers around the world. Energy-efficient design was also a driver in HP’s acquisition of EYP Mission Critical Facilities last November.

Sun Updates Blackbox for Deeper Racks

Sun Microsystems (JAVA) has expanded its line of “Blackbox” data center containers with the Sun MD D20, which reconfigures the unit’s original design to accommodate several racks of deeper servers. The D20 opens the Sun containers to a broader range of rack-mounted servers, since deeper 1U servers are often used for database applications and disaster recovery solutions that require larger amounts of disk and tape.

The original Sun MD S20 featured eight racks in a 20-foot shipping container, including seven racks for servers and one for network and internal control equipment. The D20 has room for seven racks, including four with a usable depth of 78.1 cm while the remaining three have usable depth of 115 cm (see diagram above). As a result, the D20 can hold 240 rack units, compared to 280 for the S20.

Universities Are Early Adopters on Containers

Today’s HP-Yahoo-Intel initiative on cloud computing highlights the importance of the academic and research communities in the development of cloud technologies and the wokforce to implement them. But universities are also proving to be an important emerging market for data center containers.

The University of California at San Diego has purchased one Sun MD (Blackbox) portable data center in a shipping container, and will soon purchase another. The container deals were made possible by $2 million in funding from the National Science Foundation. UC San Diego’s use of containers was detailed in a blog post this week about its Project GreenLight initiative to connect scientists and their labs to more energy-efficient “green” computer processing and storage systems using photonics.

The Solar-Powered Blackbox

The Sun Modular Data Center blog provides some details today about Sun’s demonstration of a solar powered Sun MD unit at the recent CeBIT trade show in Germany. Sun engineer Ingo Frobenius hooked the portable “Blackbox” shipping container to a solar array of photovoltaic panels that was about 65 square meters (about 700 square feet) in area. This configuration produced about 10 kilowatts of power for the equipment.

“It’s true that 10kW is not going to power a complete Sun MD unit,” wrote Paul Monday on the Sun MD blog. “The average rack has a 12.5kW power supply (though if you fill the rack with 4 Sun Blade 6000s, you will need 25kW power supplies with your rack). But keep in mind, many of our warehouses have far more than 65 square meters of space to put solar panels.”

Sun Shares Details on Project Caroline

Sun Microsystems (JAVA) used the recent SunLabs Open house to provide lots of details about Project Caroline, its new platform for small and medium sized software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers. Sun’s Rich Zippel has blogged about the event and posted links to the documentation Sun has published about Project Caroline, including two hours of video of technical presentations and live demos of the service.

Project Caroline is designed to helps software providers develop services rapidly, update in-production services frequently, and automatically adjust their use of platform resources to match changing runtime demands.

Dutch Hospital Installs Sun MD Container

Data center containers are gaining traction, and Sun Microsystems (JAVA) is the latest company to reveal a new customer. A Sun MD S20 (Blackbox) unit has been bought and installed by the Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Joerg Schwarz of Sun has photos showing the process of installing a Sun Modular Data Center, including detailed views of the preparation of the pad. As with several previous installations, the “Blackbox” is actually white (I guess the black version with the green logo looked better in marketing brochures).

Sun was the first company to make headlines when it introduced the “data center in a box” concept in October 2006. Container-based data centers have since been introduced by Rackable Systems (RACK), Verari Systems and most recently by IBM (IBM) with its iDataPlex series.

Sun Seeking Patents on Blackbox Technology

Sun Microsystems (JAVA) has filed three patent applications for technologies used in its data center in a shipping container, the Sun MD S20 (formerly Project Blackbox). Inventors named in the patents include W. Daniel Hillis and Bran Ferren, the co-chairmen of Applied Minds. Hillis, a pioneer in supercomputing, is a member of Sun’s Technical Advisory Board who developed the Blackbox concept with Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos.

The patent applications cover three technologies: a balanced chilled fluid cooling system, cooling air flow loop and server rack service utilities. The Sun MD S20 is a data center housed in a 20-foot long shipping container that can support hundreds of servers. Sun announced the project in Oct. 2006, and the first unit was shipped to a Stanford University laboratory in July 2007.

Sun Preps Cloud Platform to Vie With Amazon

Sun Microsystems (JAVA) is preparing a new utility computing platform designed to compete directly with Amazon’s S3 and EC2 services. The new service is code-named Project Caroline, and will be formally unveiled at the JavaOne conference in May, according to The Register. Sun appears to be positioning the service to be more accessible to startups and small businesses than its current cloud offering at Network.com. Here’s Sun’s description of the project:

Project Caroline is a hosting platform for development and delivery of dynamically scalable Internet-based services. It is designed to serve an emerging market of small and medium sized software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers. Anticipating needs driven by new SaaS business models and processes, Project Caroline helps SaaS providers develop services rapidly using high-level programming languages like the Java(tm) programming language, Ruby, Python, and Perl, to update in-production services frequently, and to automatically flex their use of platform resources to match changing runtime demands.

Sun Distinguished Engineer Bob Schiefler is scheduled to make a presentation about Project Caroline at the JavaOne event, which is available online and provides developers with some details on how the service will work.

Sun: We’ll Still Have Data Centers in 2015

Sun Microsystems (JAVA) has backtracked from a blog post by a data center architect saying the company wanted to eliminate in-house data centers by 2015. On Jan. 10 Brian Cinque wrote that Sun intended “to eliminate all SunIT data centers” by 2015. “Did I just say 0 data centers? Yes! Our goal is to reduce our entire data center presence by 2015.”

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has now amended that. “We will have data centers at Sun for a long time into the future,” Schwartz told reporters today, saying Cinque was simply “envisioning a world with no data centers.”

The original blog post caused confusion in some quarters, as it painted broad strokes but didn’t detail how Sun would accomplish its goal. Data Center Knowledge wrote about Cinque’s post, after which it was widely linked around the Internet. Prior to writing our story, we exchanged e-mails with Cinque to ensure that he really meant “zero data centers.” His response was not “I was a envisioning a world with no data centers” but rather “we’ll need detailed SLAs to make it work.”