Sun Modular Datacenter
| Company type | Product |
|---|---|
| Industry | Data center technology |
| Predecessor | Project Blackbox |
| Founded | October 2006 |
| Founder | Greg Papadopoulos, Dave Douglas, Danny Hillis |
| Fate | Became part of Oracle Corporation in 2010 |
| Headquarters | Santa Clara , United States |
| Products | Mobile data centers |
| Parent | Sun Microsystems (until 2010), Oracle Corporation (after 2010) |
Sun Modular Datacenter (abbreviated as Sun MD and originally known as Project Blackbox) is a mobile data center designed within a standard 20-foot intermodal container. This innovation was created and sold by Sun Microsystems, which became part of Oracle Corporation in 2010. The system accommodates up to 280 server units and can be swiftly transported and installed at sites where conventional data centers are impractical, requiring only connections for external power and cooling. Sun asserted that operating this solution costs approximately 1% of establishing a traditional data center.
History
The concept originated from Greg Papadopoulos and Dave Douglas at Sun Labs, in collaboration with Danny Hillis from Applied Minds. Their objective was to develop the largest portable "thumb drive" capable of worldwide transportation by truck, rail, or air. Utilizing the existing global intermodal container network, they converted a 20-foot shipping container to contain eight 40RU compute racks packed with servers, storage devices, and related hardware. Initial applications focused on secure mobile data centers and emergency response scenarios to quickly restore Internet connectivity.
The prototype was engineered at Applied Minds under the leadership of Adam Yates and Russ Rinfret from Sun. Introduced as "Project Blackbox" in October 2006, it incorporated 1088 AMD Opteron processors and achieved a ranking of #412 on the June 2007 TOP500 list of supercomputers. The product became commercially available in January 2008.
Marketing
- Darlene Yaplee, senior director
- Michael Bohlig
- Cheryl Martin
- Bob Schiolmueller, technical marketing
- Joe Carvalho, technical marketing
Engineering
- Jud Cooley, senior director for the initiative
- Chuck Perry, responsible for software and environmental system design
- Russ Rinfret, mechanical engineering lead
- Lee Follmer
- Tim Jolly
- Alex Barandian
- Chris Wooley
- Chris Spect
- Carl Meske
- Jeff Galloway, supply chain and vendor relations
Customers
On 14 July 2007, the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory implemented a Sun MD equipped with 252 Sun Fire X2200 compute nodes to establish a compute cluster.
In March 2009, the Internet Archive transferred its digital collection into a Sun MD located at Sun's Santa Clara headquarters, fulfilling a plan from 2003 to deploy an outdoor petabyte-scale NAS within a 40-foot shipping container.
Additional prominent clients included Radboud University.