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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.

Posted by Rich Miller May 11, 2008 | Permalink | Newsletter

April 29, 2008

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.

Posted by Rich Miller April 29, 2008 | Permalink | Newsletter

March 20, 2008

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.

Posted by Rich Miller March 20, 2008 | Permalink | Newsletter

February 19, 2008

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.

Posted by Rich Miller February 19, 2008 | Permalink | Newsletter

February 14, 2008

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."

Posted by Rich Miller February 14, 2008 | Permalink | Newsletter

January 29, 2008

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.

Posted by Rich Miller January 29, 2008 | Permalink | Newsletter

January 25, 2008

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.

Posted by Rich Miller January 25, 2008 | Permalink | Newsletter

January 16, 2008

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."

Posted by Rich Miller January 16, 2008 | Permalink | Newsletter

January 10, 2008

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.

Posted by Rich Miller January 10, 2008 | Permalink | Newsletter

November 18, 2007

DataBunker in Japan To Use 30 Blackboxes

The huge underground data center in Japan we mentioned last week may mark the first large-scale deployment of Sun's Project Blackbox portable data center product. Sun will lower 30 Blackbox units into a former coal mine located 100 meters under the ground in Japan's Chubu region. The temperature in the mine is a constant 59 degrees and the facility will use groundwater for cooling, allowing the project to use 50 percent less power than traditional facilities.

The project provides an intersection between two niche movements in the data center industry: the development of portable "data center in a box" products and the use of mines and other underground facilities as data bunkers.

Project Blackbox is an energy-efficient, water-cooled turnkey data center housed in a 20-foot shipping container that can be quickly deployed to expand existing IT infrastructure. The first Blackbox was deployed in August at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Menlo Park, Calif.

Posted by Rich Miller November 18, 2007 | Permalink | Newsletter

October 10, 2007

Sun Reviewing Google 'Blackbox' Patent

The news that Google (GOOG) has received a patent on a modular data center in a shipping container raised an immediate question: what might this mean for Sun Microsystems' Project Blackbox? The Blackbox, an energy-efficient data center housed in a 20-foot shipping container, was announced in Oct. 2005 and installed its first unit at Stanford in July. Executives of Sun have said the Blackbox resulted from a 2005 conversation between two of its technologists. Google applied for the patent in 2003.

Sun (JAVA) isn't saying much just yet. "We are aware of a modular data center patent being issued to Google," a Sun spokeswoman told The Register. "Our legal team is reviewing the patent, as this is a broad concept. Until that review is complete, we don't have further comment."

The Register speculated that Google may be an unlikely candidate to wield its patents to try and crush competitors, given its recent calls for patent reform, "As the company complains about the injustice of the patent system, it's hard to imagine it going on the offensive with its new patent. Of course, stranger things have happened."

Posted by Rich Miller October 10, 2007 | Permalink | Newsletter

October 09, 2007

Google Patents Portable Data Centers

Google (GOOG) has been awarded a U.S. patent for a portable data center in a shipping container, a development that is bound to shake up the emerging market for portable data centers. Google hasn't demonstrated that it actually has a "data center in a box," although the existence of such units has been rumored since 2005. The patent filing dates to December 2003, indicating that Google was contemplating the concept two years before PBS columnist Robert Cringely reported its existence. The patent was awarded today, and first noted at Slashdot.

The Google patent poses a challenge for other portable computing products, especially Project Blackbox from Sun Microsystems (JAVA), which is housed in a shipping container. Other companies with modular computing offerings include Rackable (RACK) with its Concerto and ICE Cube, and IBM, which has a prototype of its Scalable Modular Data Center installed at Bryant College in Rhode Island.

Posted by Rich Miller October 09, 2007 | Permalink | Newsletter

October 02, 2007

All The Wood Behind A Single Blog Post

Jonathan Schwartz wanted the attention of the tech blogosphere, or at least the Sun faithful. In choosing the title of yesterday's blog post - All The Wood Behind One Arrow - Schwartz invoked a phrase with a long history at Sun Microsystems, where it was regularly used by his predecessor as CEO, Scott McNealy.

So what's the focus of all this focus? Storage, as it turns out. "I'm radically increasing Sun's focus on storage today," Schwartz writes. "Why? Because the market's only going to grow, for as long as we're on this earth, and I believe our talent and assets give us a big sustainable advantage - that we're planning on exploiting. Aggressively." An excerpt:

I'm going to be combining our Storage and Server product teams to create a new converged group at Sun known simply as our "Systems" team. The Systems team will focus on the evolution and convergence of computing, storage and networking systems. Talk to any datacenter adminstrator, and that's what they want to hear - they live in a world managing the (often idiosyncratic) interactions of that trinity (computing, storage and networking - and just wait until they're virtualized). We want to be in a position to innovate on their behalf, at the system level, beyond the boxes - across blades, racks, disk and tape.

Hmmmm ... does that mean all the wood isn't behind Project Blackbox? Read the full entry for more details.

Posted by Rich Miller October 02, 2007 | Permalink | Newsletter