Beautifying Your Blackbox

Data center containers aren’t going to win any beauty contests. Containers are all about horsepower, efficiency and speed-to-market, right? Perhaps, but they’re not all going to be parked in garages in mammoth data centers. A case in point: the Sun MD units housed at Sun’s Menlo Park campus, which Sun’s Katy Dickinson writes about in her blog post, Blackbox Landscaping.  

“As a dedicated gardener, for the last six months I have been watching with interest the creation of a handsome landscape setting for the new Black Box now inside of Sun’s Menlo Park campus,” writes Dickinson, who has posted photos of the unusual setting. While some Sun MD customers are going with white containers, Sun has stuck with the original black version, as the green logo matches the plants and trees. Check it out.

Microsoft: PUE of 1.22 for Data Center Containers

Microsoft says its testing shows that the data center containers it is installing in its new Chicago data center are extraordinarily energy efficient. The 40-foot shipping containers packed with servers can deliver a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) energy efficiency rating of 1.22, which rivals recent PUEs reported by Google. Microsoft’s Mike Manos revealed the PUE numbers in a blog post about the Chicago data center, which has just completed its first phase of construction.

“The facility is already simply amazing and it’s a wonder to behold,” Manos writes of the $550 million, 500,000 square foot facility in Northlake, Illinois. “The joke we use internally is that this is not your mother’s data center.  You get that impression from the first moment you step into the ‘hangar bay’ on the first floor. The hangar’s first floor (pictured above) will house the container deployments and I can assure you it is like no data center you have ever seen.  It’s one more step to the industrialization of the IT world, or at least the cloud-scale operations space.”

The 40-foot CBlox containers can house as many as 2,500 servers, and Manos said they allow Microsoft to achieve a density “10 times the amount of compute in a traditional data center.” The company says it will pack between 150 and 220 containers in the first floor of the Chicago site, meaning the massive data center could house between 375,000 and 550,000 servers in the container farm.   

It also is helping Microsoft meet its goals for extraordinary energy efficiency. “Now I want to be careful here as the reporting of efficiency numbers can be a dangerous exercise in the blogosphere,” Manos writes. “But our testing shows that our containers in Chicago can deliver an average PUE of 1.22 with an AVERAGE ANNUAL PEAK PUE of 1.36. I break these two numbers out separately because there is still some debate (at least in the circles I travel in) on which of these metrics is more meaningful.  Regardless of your position on which is more meaningful, you have to admit those numbers are pretty darn compelling.” 

Are Containers Helping Google’s Low PUE?

Google’s patented “data center in a box” appears to be among the innovations helping it achieve exceptional energy efficiency ratings. The news is the latest sign of containers’ potential to deliver higher density and better energy efficiency than traditional raised floor data centers.

Google said Oct. 2 that its six company-built facilities have an average Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.21, and that one facility had reached a PUE of 1.13. Erik Teetzel, an Energy Program Manager at Google, told Data Center Knowledge that at least one of the six Google-built data centers “could in fact be a container data center.”

Google has never publicly discussed its data center container project. Last October Google was awarded a patent on a portable data centerin a shipping container, confirming a 2005 report from PBS columnist Robert Cringley that the company was building prototypes of container-based data centers in a garage in Mountain View. Containers also featured prominently in Google’s recently-disclosed patent filing for a floating data center that generates its own electricity using wave energy.

Teetzel’s comment suggests that Google has not only deployed its data center containers, but has done so ahead of Microsoft, which is currently putting the finishing touches on a huge new data center near Chicago. The bottom floor of the $550 million facility will house at least 150 data center containers packed with servers.

Dell Seeking Container Strategist

Dell is looking for an “enclosures strategist” to run its data center container business, having posted the position on LinkedIn (link via Reuven Cohen). The posting seeks an executive to “develop a strategy around Dell’s entry into the Datacenter enclosure market place” and develop “launch strategies such as competitive analysis and collateral production and customers/sales force education.”

Dell has yet to publicly admit that it has a container product, but word leaked out in May that the company was developing one for a customer. Any suspense about the identity of the customer ended in June when Microsoft’s Debra Chrapaty mentioned that “Dell has a pretty nice container” while discussing the company’s infrastructure plans with Om Malik.

While Microsoft is using containers to build a cloud platform for its Live online services, the job posting places the enclosure effort in Dell’s Enterprise Product Group, meaning Dell sees a market beyond the clouds.

Microsoft CBlox Data Center Containers

Microsoft recently announced that it will park more than 150 shipping containers filled with servers in its huge new data center in Chicago. Microsoft Director of Data Center Research Daniel Costello provided a detailed look at Microsoft’s plans for its CBlox data center containers during the GigaOm Structure 08 conference in San Francisco on June 25. Here’s a video of Daniel’s presentation, in two parts. This first segment runs about 9 minutes and 30 seconds.

For more news about the Microsoft’s containers, visit our Microsoft Channel. For additional video, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.

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.

Rackable to Offer IBM BladeCenter in ICE Cube

Rackable Systems (RACK) will offer customers the option of packing its ICE Cube data center container with IBM BladeCenter servers, the two companies said today. The move is the latest step toward a more open approach to containers and will provide more choice to customers shopping for containers. It may also focus attention on container design as a differentiator between the growing number of vendor options.

Rackable previously had only offered the ICE Cube container with its own custom rackmount servers, following the lead of the Sun MD (Blackbox) from Sun Microsystems’ (JAVA). Subsequent products from Verari Systems and HP have offered the option of packing other vendors’ gear in their containers.

In a conference call with analysts in May, Rackable CEO Mark Barrenechea discussed the ICE Cube as a “deployment option” - another form factor for Rackable’s customers. The new agreement, in which IBM BladeCenter will be the only blade server platform available for custom ICE Cube implementations, reflects a more strategic approach to the container.

HP Unveils its POD Data Center Container

HP today unveiled a data center container, the Performance Optimized Data Center (POD), joining the growing ranks of major vendors introducing container products. HP said the POD, which can be shipped in just six weeks, will allow customers to rapidly expand their data center capacity.

HP’s introduction of a container product was widely expected, as most of its major competitors have announced similar solutions. Vendors offering container solutions include Sun Microsystems (JAVA), Rackable (RACK), IBM and Verari Systems. Dell is also building data center containers for customers, but has not announced a container product.

The HP POD will support both HP and third-party technology, a contrast to containers optimized for vendor-specific hardware. HP also says its container allows a denser server environment than competing products, with power capacity up to 27kW per rack, or 1,800+ watts per square foot. The 40-foot POD can support more than 3,500 compute nodes or 12,000 LFF hard drives, offering the computing equivalent of about 4,000 square foot of traditional data center space.

Containers as an Energy Efficiency Tool

Microsoft’s decision to adopt data center containers in its next-generation facility in Chicago provided a way to optimize the company’s computing infrastructure for extraordinary density and scalability. By housing equipment in 40-foot shipping containers, Microsoft gained another major benefit: energy efficiency.

At a time when the industry is focused on green data centers, the data center containers used in Microsoft’s testing are exceptionally efficient, according to the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric developed by The Green Grid.

“On the proof-of-concept we ran we saw PUE numbers come in at 1.3, and if you compare that with historical data centers, it’s very, very low,” said Daniel Costello, Microsoft’s Director of Data Center Research. “Most data centers around the world would be 1.6 to 2.0.”

In a presentation at last week’s Structure 08 conference in San Francisco, Costello said the containers’ efficient power architecture allows Microsoft to put between 1,000 and 3,000 servers in a container, based upon the configuration.

IBM Launches Modular Data Centers, Containers

IBM is jumping into the “data center in a box” game with both feet, rolling out a suite of modular and container-based systems designed to help companies to rapidly expand and extend their data center capacity. The announcement of the new line of data centers is part of Project Big Green, IBM’s commitment to invest $1 billion a year in technologies to improve the energy efficiency of its in-house and customer facilities.

IBM’s new products standardize data center design for several modular “form factors,” including a 5,000-square-foot module for enterprise customers, data center container products in both 20-foot and 40-foot shipping containers, and a 200-square-foot module that allows users to quickly create a high-density zone within a low-density data center.

These modular data centers are designed to make it cheaper and quicker for customers to expand their data center space, saving money through energy efficient equipment and a “repeatable” design.

“It’s very clear that data center design and build has to change dramatically,” said Steve Sams of IBM Global Technology. “We have to change the model that’s been used over the last 20 years to really design in scalability.”

“At IBM we have built more data centers for our clients than anyone else in the world,” said Brian Canney, IBM Global Services Executive for Site and Facilities Services. “IBM has designed and customized more than 30 million square feet of data center space, and we’re starting to modularize this approach.”