The Briefcase Server: Maybe Too Portable?

Earlier in the week GigaOm featured a "data center in a briefcase," a personal project in which Jimmy Pike, the director of system architecture at Dell’s Data Center Solutions, built two servers and some solid state storage drives into a briefcase. This is a cool project that Pike built in his garage. "It's a convenient way to do testing and things I'm interested in and carry them back and forth," he told GigaOm's Stacey Higginbotham.

Next thing you know, CrunchGear is suggesting that Pike's data center in a briefcase "may be a sign of things to come. ... It’s not the kind of thing you’re going to build out the next big web application on, but this looks like a solid start from which to start building more modular data centers."

Before anyone gets carried away, let's be mindful of the prospect that a briefcase data center might, well ... get carried away. Data center containers are portable, but you don't see anyone running off with one. Not so with a 40-pound briefcase. But at least it's big enough that you're unlikely to leave it in a cab or drop in the toilet, which are hazards for the iPhone Web Server. Here's a closer look at Pike's "data center in a briefcase."