Sun: Project Blackbox

A few days ago, in front of our university (MIT – Politecnico di Milano), appeared a big black box with the Sun logo on its sides.

Sun’s guys were here to present the “Sun Modular Datacenter S20″ also known as Project Blackbox: it is a virtualized datacenter, built into a shipping container, first announced in October 2006, but officially presented in January 2008. The project is a computing powerhouse, placed among the top 200 fastet supercomputers globally, which maximizes energy efficiencies and reduces electronic waste.

The container is 6.06m (20 feet) long, 2.44m (8 feet) wide and 2.59m (8 feet 6 inches) tall; empty its weight is 8,000 kg (18,000 lb.), but reaches 15,000 kg (34,000 lb.) when fully loaded. It house 8 40U racks (7 for server, storage, etc. and 1 for network and system management equipment) and, with its 4 water hook-ups (2 per side), can cool up to 25kW per rack.

The cooling system keep the inner temperature under 35°C (95°F) with maximum noncondensing relative humidity under 80%. The system can operate between 10°C (50°F) and 35°C (inner temperature) and can be placed in an enviroment between -29°C (-20°F) and 54°C (130°F) and at a maximum altitude of 3,000m (10,000 ft).
The cooling system works using both air and cold water. Each rack has 10 fans, 5 in the front and 5 in the back: the frontal ones bring fresh air inside and the others let hot air outside the rack. Between each rack tubes with cold water cool hot air to bring new fresh air to the next rack.

The container has one power panel on both sides providing 415 VAC (300 A) per panel at 380 V (3 phase).

Concerning network connectivity, SMD supports two network panels offering different option starting from standard RJ-45 and/or LC fibre -single or multi mode- connectors to bulk cable pass-through panel.

The container offers 320 RU divided in 280 RU for IT equipment, 25 RU for network equipment and 15 RU reserved for SMD monitoring and management system. Customers can choose between different Sun equipments such as Sun Fire servers, StorageTek systems, Blade system, etc. but also third part material.

The box is also provided by an efficient fire preventing system in charge of keeping safe the internal environment.

SMD can work even in very difficult condition: for example it can resist a magnitude 6.7 earthquake without stopping his service as you can see in this video: SMD Earthquake Test.

More information can be found at Sun’s website.

Here are some photos of SMD:

Sun Modular Datacenter 1

Sun Modular Datacenter 2

Sun Modular Datacenter 3