Blackbox Comes In For A Landing

What's that in the sky? A bird? A plane? In fact, it's a Sun Blackbox coming in for a landing. The Where Is Project Blackbox? blog provides links to photos and videos of the first customer installation at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in Palo Alto, Calif. The 20-foot container, packed with more than 250 servers, arrives on a flatbed truck and then is hoisted on a crane and lowered into position on a concrete pad behind Building 50 at SLAC. The visuals provide a sense of what's involved in the delivery of the unit.

Sun's Project Blackbox is a portable data center in a 20-foot long shipping container, with an integrated cooling system to support high-density computing. The product was announced last October, but the SLAC is the first to receive a working Blackbox. A Canadian data center provider, eNation, has begun marketing customized Blackboxes that it will configure and install for customers, most of whom are in the casino industry.