Sun's Blackbox: Game-Changer or Niche Product?

Blackbox changes the fundamental economics of data centers. If you own a data center today, it wouldn't be a bad idea to start looking around for someone to buy it from you. As of next year, that data center is going to become a rapidly depreciating investment.

The sweet spot of companies for whom this will be ideal seems small. It's impact on Sun's business won't be as significant as what it represents, the continuing commoditization of corporate infrastructure.

A mobile data center is nothing new. We have seen APC deliver a mobile data center on wheels. We have seen manufacturers such as iFortress or Rittal's Lampertz product line which both provide heavy duty and easily constructed mobile data center facilities. ... The Sun "Data Center in a Box" provides the industry with another choice that can meet the need of the consumer, but is it needed and will the industry embrace it or will it become a small niche market product? Time will tell.

Despite Sun's optimism, we wonder how many will buy into this version of computing on demand. Connecting data centers to the internet is not a trivial task, and our friends who are savvy in the ways of routers and switches often share their woes over a pint.

Sun has long stated that the network is the computer. Now with Project Blackbox, the container is the computer. In this thinking vendors are several steps ahead of data center managers, who are trying to make these systems work in existing racks in data centers using cooling and power delivery systems that may have been designed 5, 10 or 15 years ago.

While the idea behind Project Blackbox is ingenious, it is no more than a strategy for Sun to sell more boxes. If people are thinking about ecology impact, reducing energy bills, better power utilisation, etc, they need to start thinking about building better and more efficient software applications and taking advantage of virtualization and clustering to increase CPU utilisation.