Sun, which has its Blackbox containerized data center out on tour, is suddenly facing some tough competition in the burgeoning trailer park computing market. Rackable Systems is rolling out a copycat product called Concentro that may just outdo the original. Besides sporting a most excellent name – if Flash Gordon had a computer, it would be called Concentro – Rackable’s portable data center comes in a 40-foot shipping container, making Sun’s 20-foot model look downright wimpy, and it can be packed with 9,600 processing cores or 3.5 petabytes of storage. Best of all is the interior. Check it out:
Stick David Bowie in there, and you’ve got your moody sci-fi epic half made.
For more details, see articles by the Register’s Ashlee Vance and IT Jungle’s Timothy Prickett Morgan. Prickett Morgan notes that Concentro comes equipped with LoJack, just in case some meth-addled kid decides to hook it to the back of his Ram Charger and go for a joyride.
Seems everyone is doing it. Check out this presentation by Microsoft: http://research.microsoft.com/~jamesrh/TalksAndPapers/JamesRH_Amazon.ppt
Google container…
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2005/pulpit_20051117_000873.html
Well, have you calculated how fast three of those babies, loaded on a plane and connected with a server can replace a backbone? If it is supposedly faster to send Petabytes on a boat to Australia then to use the usual methods, what about the big-boys version of a sneaker-net?
Truth be told, I wouldn’t have though those looked half as cool.