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.”

Sun Rebrands Blackbox as ‘Sun MD’

Sun Microsystems (JAVA) is rebranding Project Blackbox, its data center in a shipping container, which will now become Sun Modular Datacenter, or Sun MD S20. Sun also announced several additional customers for the “data center in a box,” as well as a suite of support services for customers.

The company’s announcement didn’t give a reason for the rebranding, apart from it becoming a “formal product.” Sun invested heavily in publicity for the Project Blackbox brand, including a world tour in which the Blackbox prototype visited 73 cities on 4 continents and was toured by more than 12,000 customers and partners. It also wasn’t clear whether the “S20″ addendum meant other form factors would follow in the future. Rackable Systems (RACK) currently offers its ICE Cube portable data center in both 20-foot and 40-foot versions.

Sun has previously identified just two Sun MD users - the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in Menlo Park, Calif. and Mobile TeleSystems OJSC (MTS) in Moscow. Today Sun said the Sun MD has been deployed at Hansen Transmissions’ manufacturing facility in India, and Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre (UMCN) in the Netherlands.

Belgium-based Hansen Transmissions is employing Sun MD S20s in its program to expand wind turbine and industrial gearbox manufacturing facilities in India and China, while Radboud University bought a Sun Modular Datacenter to handle the overflow load from its two maxed-out server farms. Sun also said a movie studio is studying whether to do its film rendering using Sun Modular Datacenters, and then deploy the units as server farms to support marketing efforts after the movie is completed.

Sun Blackbox Deployed Across Russia

Sun Microsystems (JAVA) says its portable data center, Project Blackbox, has been deployed in remote areas of Russia by that country’s largest mobile phone company, extending service to places where it would be difficult to build data centers.

Project Blackbox 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 Blackbox was shipped to a Stanford University laboratory in July 2007. In Sun’s quarterly earnings call yesterday, CEO Jonathan Schwartz talked about an additional Blackbox customer.

“MTS or Mobile Telesystems, the largest mobile phone operator in Russia, selected and deployed Sun’s Project Blackbox across their service territories, enabling services in locations without Class A data centre facilities, and giving them a remote operations in management capability others were unable to meet,” Schwartz said.

Sun Acquires MySQL for $1 Billion

Sun Microsystems (JAVA) is acquiring open source database vendor MySQL AB for $1 billion, the companies said this morning. MySQL databases have become ubiquitous in web hosting, serving as the database piece of the open source LAMP stack (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) that runs many of the most popular web sites.

“The adoption of MySQL across the globe is nothing short of breathtaking,” Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz noted in announcing the deal. “They are the root stock from which an enormous portion of the web economy springs.”

Is this a good thing? Tim O’Reilly, who is on the board of MySQL and produces the MySQL User Conference, weighed in shortly after the announcement. “This seems to me to be a great deal both for Sun and for MySQL,” O’Reilly writes, noting that Sun “has staked its future on open source, releasing its formerly proprietary crown jewels, including Solaris, Java, and the Ultra-Sparc processor design.”

Sun’s Goal: No In-House Data Centers by 2015

Sun Microsystems Data Center Architect Brian Cinque has launched a new blog with a flourish, announcing the company’s intention “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,” writes Brian, who says the goal will be to reduce data center square footage by 50 percent by 2013, followed by a two-year process of shifting Sun’s IT operations to a software as a service (SaaS) model.

The timing of Cinque’s post is interesting, as the plans by Sun (JAVA) plans reflect exactly the shift to web-based hosting discussed by Nick Carr in his book The Big Switch, which has been widely discussed since its publication Monday.