By Leslie T. O'Neill

29 January 2008 - When breakthrough technologies become real products, creative organisations not only take notice, they put them to work as quickly as possible, and in as many ways as they can think of. That's exactly what happened with Sun's Project Blackbox, the world's first virtualised data centre. A variety of customers have already found ways to deploy this innovative integrated data centre that take advantage of its flexibility, its transportability and its ruggedness.

Sun Modular Datacenter (Sun MD) S20, widely known as Project Blackbox, is Sun's comprehensive data centre delivered in a shipping container. The 20' enhanced container can be loaded into almost any transportation system and delivered to your site, ready to be installed by the customer, by Sun or by a Sun partner. Inside is an integrated power, cooling and rack system that can be populated with any 19" rackable, front-to-back cooled equipment that fits your computing needs.

The Sun Modular Datacenter includes an innovative closed-loop water cooling system, and can be hooked up to whatever power source you require. The Sun Modular Datacenter Suite of Services can help you determine just how your unit should be equipped, and how to provision for its power and cooling infrastructure.

Sun Modular Datacenter has been deployed at sites around the world -- including the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in Menlo Park, California, Mobile TeleSystems OJSC (MTS) in Moscow, Hansen Transmissions' manufacturing facility in India and Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre (UMCN) in the Netherlands. These organisations are using Sun MD to quickly add cost-effective, high-density compute capacity, and its flexibility has meant that Sun MD can be adapted to their existing IT infrastructure, or become an entire new IT environment.

"It is very exciting to have Sun Modular Datacenter S20 here at our centre because of its simplicity. Every organisation, whether it is a physics lab or a financial institution, is going to be faced with the same problem of running out of data centre support resources. The chief benefit is this has allowed us to increase our data processing and computing capacity faster -- by a factor of three, which we couldn't have done with any other way accessible to us", said Richard Mount, Director of Computing Services, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

Sun MD is a Quickly Deployable, Repeatable Solution

SLAC was the first U.S. organisation to deploy Sun Modular Datacenter. It was installed when SLAC needed to rapidly expand its compute capabilities while balancing the diminishing power and cooling capacity available in its computing building. SLAC's second Sun MD has already been shipped and will quickly enable it to expand its compute power even more.

"Sun Modular Datacenter helped us answer the very real challenge of how to scale up computing resources quickly, and this has meant the difference between success and failure", adds Mount.

Similarly, Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre (UMCN) deployed a Sun Modular Datacenter to handle the overflow load from its two maxed-out server farms. The university chose Sun Modular Datacenter because it could quickly add new compute and storage capacity without ratcheting up its costs.

Sun MD was designed to provide a repeatable solution for quickly adding incremental, heterogeneous compute capacity in a highly dense form factor. Its use of standard 19" racks gives customers the flexibility to configure Sun MD to meet their needs today and alter the payload and redeploy it as business needs change. Customers, either alone or together with Sun services, determine Sun MD payload — the new and existing servers, storage, software and services — that will be installed inside. Sun services can also assist with site planning, installation, testing and lights-out management. (Take a look inside a Sun MD S20).

Each Sun MD starts life as an enhanced 20' shipping container that includes the full insulation, plumbing, redundant power connectivity, up to 25 kilowatts per IT rack capacity, control equipment, fire suppression system, fans and air filters you would expect in a brick-and-mortar data centre. Built to withstand temperatures from -20 degrees Fahrenheit to 130 degrees Fahrenheit and absorb shocks, a Sun Modular Datacenter unit can be installed in a car park, on the roof of a skyscraper, even on the back of a lorry or on board a ship.

"The Sun Modular Datacenter uses an innovative water cooling system, which is 40 percent more efficient, independent of payload, than the cooling system in a traditional data centre and reduces cooling costs significantly", says Cloutier, Sun's senior product manager for Sun Modular Datacenter S20. "And after five years, it's estimated that a Sun Modular Datacenter will have saved nearly 1500 metric tons of carbon dioxide. In addition, Sun is committed to recycle and reuse these units, which means that their parts will be recycled to the greatest extent possible."

Flexible Deployments, Exciting Scenarios

Sun Modular Datacenter's designers knew the unit would be appealing to a wide variety of customers, underscored by the more than 12,000 customers and partners that came to see the unit during the Sun MD Tour, which stopped at 73 cities on four continents. Even then, the number and variety of applications people were thinking of was intriguing and sometimes surprising. "In general, we found that people need to incrementally add every sort of capability and capacity to their data centres — they're out of physical space, they're out of cooling capacity, they're out of compute capacity. Customers can quickly replicate and expand their existing data centre in the Sun MD", adds Cloutier.

In addition to cost-effectively adding capacity to an existing data centre, Sun MD is rugged enough to be quickly deployed wherever in the world a company most needs it — either close to a growing customer base, to support IT while facilities are being consolidated or expanded, as a movable disaster recovery solution, near lower-cost or renewable sources or on less expensive property. In addition, Sun MD can be easily reconfigured to do any combination of all these things as the organisation's needs change.

MTS, the largest mobile phone operator in Russia and the CIS, installed the first Sun MD in Eurasia. It is currently field-testing the unit for expected production use on its Moscow and Central Russia regions' infrastructure, which services more than 20 million subscribers. Belgium-based Hansen Transmissions is employing Sun MD S20s in its programme to expand wind turbine and industrial gearbox manufacturing facilities in India and China.

"In planning for Hansen Transmissions' expansion in India, we considered building a new data centre ourselves, but determined we needed to be able to offer IT services while the plant was under construction. Sun Modular Datacenter S20 is a great solution for us -- cost effective and easy-to deploy", says Marnix Maes, Hansen's director of IT. "Using Sun Modular Datacenter, we'll be able to offer IT services in a semi-finished factory and start seeing ROI almost immediately. We also expect to use the same model to support our expansion in other countries", adds Maes. Once the infrastructure is established and in place, Sun can simply deliver additional modular data centres with duplicate configurations too, and drop them in wherever they are needed.

Just the Beginning

Sun MD is quickly gaining momentum around the world as customers devise ingenious ways to use this innovative virtualised modular data centre. For example, the Japanese government is exploring a project to install Sun MD units underground using natural ground water for cooling, which would potentially reduce its already low cooling costs to zero. A movie studio is thinking about doing its film rendering on site using Sun Modular Datacenters, and then converting its units into server farms to support marketing efforts after the movie is completed.

"Sun Modular Datacenter is revolutionising how organisations increase IT capacity because it is turning the normally custom job of building data centres into something that's repeatable, faster to deploy and over time, a lot less expensive than a traditional data centre", explains Cloutier. He adds that the breakthrough is that Sun MD's innovative design enables a computing configuration to be built for a customer's particular needs, and can also be easily repeated at a lower cost than any traditional solution. "That fundamentally changes the economic equation", he says.

With its innovative, patent-pending cooling system, the Sun Modular Datacenter's flexible, innovative design lets you put the compute power you need almost anywhere you need it, any time you need it.

Learn More About Sun MD

You can attend one of Sun's upcoming Sun Modular Datacenter tours. What's more, you can learn more about Sun Modular Datacenter on sun.com: www.sun.com/sunmd.

Sun Modular Datacenter is now available for ordering for deployment to many locations. To initiate a Sun Modular Datacenter deployment at your locale, contact your local Sun sales representative or email us.