Verari Offers Data Center in a Container

Last month we wrote that 2008 may be a breakthrough year for containers. Today the fast-growing market for portable modular data center solutions has a new player. Verari Systems has introduced FOREST, a container-based data center that can house up to 1,400 servers or 11.5 petabytes of storage in a 40-foot shipping container. The unit has a capacity of 400 kilowatts of power, and offers the option of either self-contained cooling or chilled water cooling.

Verari Systems specializes in blade-based server and storage products for use in high-density computing and data center consolidation. Its customers include Akamai, Microsoft, Northrop Grumman and Sony Imageworks. FOREST is an acronym for "Flexible, Open, Reliable, Energy efficient, Scalable and Transportable," and dovetails with Verari's focus on environmentally-friendly computing. The product data sheet features a FOREST container adorned with a scene of pine forest set against a backdrop of mountains.

"We've carefully engineered a solution that packages high density storage and compute blades with self-contained cooling into a portable data center that can be shipped virtually anywhere," said David B. Wright, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Verari Systems. "The FOREST container solution is ideal for companies in need of space saving enterprise computing with increased energy efficient capacity. We've eliminated the need for expensive real estate to house a data center installation, as well as the permits to build them."

The Verari FOREST is the third commercial containerized data center product, following the Sun MD S20 from Sun Microsystems (JAVA) and the ICE Cube container from Rackable (RACK). Verari says FOREST "is not proprietary, unlike our competition's solutions whose products may not support other vendor's equipment. ... we understand that in some cases the optimal solution may very well need to house networking equipment or even existing nodes from manufacturers using less efficient (than Verari) traditional front-to-back cooling." Verari uses a vertical cooling architecture.

See additional coverage at Server Specs.