Intel Considering Portable Data Centers

It's been more than a year since Sun Microsystems (JAVAD) announced Project Blackbox, its container-based "data center in a box." We've been closely tracking developments with portable data centers, including the subsequent product announcements from Rackable (RACK). The concept has generated much interest and discussion, but deployment has thus far been limited to a Blackbox at Stanford and three ICE Cube customer shipments by Rackable.

This week there's evidence that one of the tech sector's biggest names is thinking portable. In a recent issue of its Premier IT magazine (via John Rath), Intel indicated that it is taking a serious look at deploying portable data centers in shipping containers. Here's a summary from Martin Menard, the director of Intel's Platform Capability Group: