Data centres are becoming an increasing problem for the IT industry. They take up a lot of physical space, they use a lot of energy and they're not particularly environmentally friendly. They are, however, essential to business, so over the last few years IT companies have been frantically trying to come up with innovative, cost effective and energy efficient solutions to the thorny issue of data centres. So far, it appears that portable data centres are the answer, and more specifically, data centres in a box.
Two years ago, Sun Microsystems unveiled new portable data centres that were built within standard-sized shipping containers. At the time, Anil Gadre, the chief marketing officer at Sun, described them as prefab housing, "a trailer full of gear ready to go." They aimed to market the Black Box as a pre-configured infrastructure that would allow clients to quickly add to their computing capacity. The Black Box servers would also save companies a great deal of space, as they occupy a third of the ground covered by a conventional data centre, and they are also about one fifth of the price. The only thing that users would have to provide is power and a water cooling system.
In June this year, IBM revealed their energy saving initiative, Project Gig Green. An important part of the project consists of their version of the data-centre-in-a-shipping-container idea. Their new portable data centres have been designed to halve energy costs and optimise energy efficiency. Their "shrink-wrapped" data centres also dramatically decrease the time it takes to increase data capacity, and can be standardised for facilities ranging from 5,000 to 20,000 square feet.
And in July this year, HP revealed a project that is more of the same. HP's Performance-Optimised Datacentre (Pod) apparently fits an entire data centre (usually around 4,000 square feet) into a standard-sized 40-foot shipping container. They claim to be able to fit around 3,500 CPU nodes and 12,000 hard drives into a container, and still have enough room left over for a technician to comfortably access the hardware. They also claim that the units can be custom-assembled and delivered within 6 weeks of an order received. HP hopes that their customisation will set them apart in the boxed data centre market.
It seems that shipping containers are the ideal solutions for companies that demand more from their data centres, including energy efficiency, speed and convenience. Transport options and dramatically reduced costs are just two more reasons to embrace technology in a box.