“Sun has always been somewhat of a mysterious company, from its humble origins at Stanford University through the dotcom boom and out the other side. Its numerous changes of strategic direction have confounded attempts to pin the company down. One thing almost everyone agrees on, however, is that Sun still makes very powerful server hardware. So when I was offered the opportunity to get a guided tour of Sun’s new ‘Project Blackbox’, I jumped at the chance.”
… APC’s InfraStruXure systems, but in a box. In fact, I seriously considered avoiding APC and going with these crates at my data center. Time to market was the only killer of the deal (which I might resume in the future…)
Even if you don’t have mobility needs, these still represent quite a nice way to build out your data center with the least amount of hassle. I imagine you can buy a large warehouse, and stack it full of these, without all the headaches of building out a true full-service DC.
I’m just waiting on availability/pricing information before going further, but these look like an awesome solution to a lot of problems!
Keep up the good work, Sun.
I got the opportunity to look at BlackBox when Sun brought it out to one of Raytheon’s locations. What the ArsTechnica article doesn’t mention is that certain model Sun machines will not fit in BlackBox, for example if you wanted one configured with say 2 25K’s and a number of storage arrays, the large SunFire machines won’t fit. For most applications of BlackBox, I don’t see that as a problem.
It reminds me of the mobile aerial processing facility I used to maintain when I was in the Navy. All you needed was power and water, and part of the package in our case was a diesel generator. BlackBox has military applications written all over it, although it could just as easily be deployed in say a situation like a natural disaster to provide digital imaging/GIS and like services in an area where the existing infrastructue is destroyed or otherwise unavailable.
We were given approximate numbers just for the container at around $400,000, and the cost goes up depending on how you outfit the container. Expensive, but very cool!
Cool PR idea .
.. does remind me of video trucks .
Big massive things with expensive cool things stuffed into them –
.. well and KnightRider (sorry but I had to say that 
)
A mobile truck system which provides “it all” seems rather cool to me – cheap crappy mobile computers/phones/cameras which are then wirelessly linked to the truck which provides the actual abilities to quickly provide these abilities to a place .
This thin client / online desktop thing again – a memory stick (2GB should be enough for most I guess) which stores user config files & some data – attached to phone/mobile pc etc- and the actual expensive computing needs & parts are meet by the host system .
Although Im not sure if its not just spare processing & storage power looking for something to do & generic “use-once” phones etc (they exist right?- like these use-once (or more often – but get the job done albeit at crap quality) digi cams for 10 Euros or so) simply being cheaper to produce & work better than some fancy mobile storage & processing monster to please all needs – thing .
Apologies for my absolutely awful sentence structures .
Just IMO
Sun *Micro*systems.. So when are we going to see computing power sold to us in pounds instead of MHz/GBs/etc?
– Can I have a pound of UltraSPARC and three quarters of AMD to go?
– Would you like some OS with that?
Now that button looks cool. Reminds me of an episode of Stand Alone Complex where heroes had to shut down their 1337van and it was animated in a very dramatic fashion