data center on cargo containers

Data centers tend to be a huge deal these days.. The challenge comes specially because companies are now dealing with humongous amounts of data. Google, Yahoo, MSN, with the goals of caching every byte of digital media, and being able to search through them in fraction of second, require storage and processing of petabytes of data.

Not just the search companies, but any data intensive industry, such as financial trading firms, telecom industry, ecommerce sites like ebay, amazon, etc. need huge data centers.

The increasing demands have so far been coped with ad-hoc construction of data centers by putting together racks of cheap or high-end machines, depending on criticality of application. Dissipating heat and huge power requirements have been the fundamental issues in design.

Well, obviously, these ad-hoc solutions are still expensive and often far from optimal. Mobility is another special challenge. To start a data center in Paris, Google will have to send out its crew of engineers for days, often a cost companies cant bear.

So now industry has come up with a very indeginous solution. Cargo Containers. Yes, data centers that can be customized, and shipped in cargo containers.

Read this research paper from Microsoft:

http://www-db.cs.wisc.edu/cidr/cidr2007/papers/P35.pdf

Look at this promo video from Sun's Black Box project:

http://sun.feedroom.com/?skin=oneclip&fr_story=FEEDROOM162914&rf=bm

Wonder who else in industry is going to manufacture these containers.

[Update] I recently learned from this post from John Battelle (the author of famous "search" book) that even Google itself had similar project.. But it was abandoned because managers didnt puruse it far enough.