Stanford center turns to Sun Blackbox for extra capacity
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When the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) wanted to increase its computing capacity last year it considered a satellite datacenter or an extension to the existing building, but in the end it chose a faster and more novel approach: it ordered a datacenter in a box.The center, which does high-energy physics research for the U.S. Department of Energy, was one of the first customers for&#160;Sun Microsystems&#39; Project Blackbox, which takes standard shipping containers 20 feet by 8 feet by 8 feet (6.1m x 2.4m x 2.4m) and turns them into mini datacenters that can be delivered and operational in a few weeks, according to Sun.SLAC&#39;s Blackbox was delivered in July last year and was up and running by September. Aside from a few challenges -- like figuring out how to service the unit when it&#39;s raining -- the center is pleased with its choice and in the process of installing a second unit.It is one of four customers that Sun identified Tuesday to illustrate momentum for Project Blackbox. It also renamed the product the Sun Modular Datacenter, or Sun MD. The boxes start at $559,000 without the &quot;payload,&quot; or the computers inside, and Sun will ship them around the world for an extra fee. Delivery to Amsterdam by air, for example, costs about $15,000.SLAC turned to Project Blackbox because it needed to expand its compute capacity fairly quickly. &quot;The datacenter here was at its capacity, especially in terms of the electrical service to the building and the amount of heat we could take back out. And the experiments needed their next year&#39;s worth of computing,&quot; said Chuck Boeheim, SLAC&#39;s assistant director of computing services.Modifying its existing datacenter to accommodate another major electrical feed and &quot;chiller plant&quot; would have taken one to two years and cost several million dollars. &quot;We also looked at doing a satellite datacenter in a smaller building, but with the approvals and lead time that was a couple of years out as well. Blackbox was something we could do very quickly,&quot; Boeheim said.The raw shipping containers are customized by a subcontractor, and Sun typically installs the payload before delivery. SLAC&#39;s Blackbox arrived on a flat-bed truck last July, fitted with 252 Sun Fire X2200 rack-mount servers, the same type it uses in its datacenter. Sun had also wired the servers to a Cisco Catalyst 6509 switch that SLAC provided before delivery.Boeheim described the process in a white paper on his Web site, along with photos and time-lapse videos that show the box being hoisted into place by a crane.Customers can put other vendors&#39; hardware in the unit, but not all equipment will fit. SLAC bought some Dell PowerEdge 1950 servers that it wanted to put in its second Blackbox, but they were too long for the server racks. Instead it will move some existing Sun servers to the box from its datacenter, and put the Dell machines inside the building instead.The computing center already had a 4-megawatt substation serving its area of the site. &quot;So it was a fairly simple matter to put a 220-kilowatt power pane on the outside of that and bring up a fairly standard chiller unit and put that on a concrete pad next to the Blackbox. Both of those things could just be fork-lifted in and connected up,&quot; Boeheim said.SLAC wanted to do a rigorous installation that would last several years, so it spent a few weeks getting the unit hooked up. It had to reconnect about half the power cords which had shaken loose during the truck ride. Aside from that the installation went smoothly and the machines were turned on for batch work Sept. 25, about two months after delivery. The 60-ton chiller and the outside power unit were also delivered in that time.Servicing the unit has presented some challenges. &quot;We&#39;re trying to figure out how to do it on a day like today when it&#39;s pouring with rain,&quot; Boeheim said recently. &quot;The wind doesn&#39;t have to be blowing very hard for the rain to blow in the end, and you pretty much have to open both ends of the box to service it,&quot;It&#39;s quite cramped in the box, he said, and both ends need to be open so that a person can maneuver when a server rack is slid out into the narrow central aisle.&quot;Our stance right now is to wait for a clear day to open it up,&quot; he said. Two people are needed to service the box in case one gets trapped inside or injured, he wrote in the white paper on his Web site. SLAC put a phone in the box in case someone gets locked in.The first Blackbox gave the center a roughly 25 percent boost in computing capacity, and the servers have been running as smoothly as their counterparts inside the datacenter, Boeheim said. &quot;Once we got them turned on they just ran. We went a full 30 days not even opening the thing.&quot; He put rack servers in the box rather than storage gear, because storage gear tends to need servicing more often, he said.Sun&#39;s Blackbox won&#39;t be for everyone. Brookhaven National Laboratory, on Long Island, New York, considered a Blackbox but decided on a new wing for its datacenter instead, Boeheim said. SLAC&#39;s experience may have been easier than that of an average business because it is a federal government site located on county land. A business in a city may need more planning permissions and permits.A few other companies offer comparable products, such as the Ice Cube from Rackable Systems, and the Infrastructure Express from American Power Conversion.Sun said it is happy with the&#160;momentum for Blackbox, although it wouldn&#39;t say how many customers it has. The other three it named are Hansen Transmissions, a Belgian industrial manufacturer that is using one at a new plant in India; Mobile TeleSystems, Russia&#39;s largest mobile operator; and the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre in the Netherlands.Most of the customers had no room to add capacity in their datacenters, said Darlene Yaplee, vice president for integrated platforms in Sun&#39;s systems marketing group. &quot;Half the customers are using it while they build extra datacenter capacity, and then it will remain for disaster recovery,&quot; she said.The next size up in standard shipping containers is 40 feet long. &quot;We could do 40 feet technically, but most people have been happy with 20 feet,&quot; Yaplee said. Boeheim said he&#39;d probably choose a wider box rather than a longer one, which would accommodate his Dell 1950 servers.
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Besides unleashing Solaris 10, Sun Microsystems on Monday plans to turn the spotlight on new storage hardware and software offerings as part of its quarterly product launch.
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Sun Microsystems and the University of Texas have teamed to create an UltraSparc-powered giant that will crunch 3D tasks for the school.
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A novel nanolaser could cram more data onto a hard disk.
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Using a novel new approach, scientists at the Imperial College in London are on the path to optical storage that dwarfs the capacities of current DVD&#39;s and even upcoming, blue laser-based discs.
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A new solar breakthrough could expand a subsidiary's business.
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SUN ANNOUNCED THE UltraSPARC IV+ this morning, most probably the last of its line. Sun will be taking a new direction from this point on, with the new Fujitsu co-developed chips being a definite step sideways
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(InfoWorld) - As Sun Microsystems prepares to demonstrate a new high-performance computer Tuesday at a technology conference in Germany, it hopes that quad-core processors from Advanced Micro DevicesÂ that will power the computer arrive on time to deliver one of the machines to its first customer. Sun is going to introduce its Constellation system at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, at which other supercomputer makers are gathering and at which a twice-yearly list of the world's Top 500 supercomputers is to be released Wednesday. IBM, whose Blue Gene/L supercomputer wasÂ No. 1 in a November 2006 Top 500 listÂ based on system performance, will introduce what it says is a still faster Blue Gene/P Tuesday. Sun chose the AMD Opteron quad-core chip,Â code-named Barcelona, over rival Intel'sÂ quad-core Xeon 5300 chip, because it believes AMD's will be "the fastest chip on the market this year," said Andreas Bechtolsheim, chief architect and senior vice president of the systems group at Sun. "We are still hopeful that they will deliver the chips on time." Sun also hopes Constellation can be out in time to be considered for the November Top 500 list. AMD's stock was downgraded June 6 by some investment analysts who questioned the chip maker's ability to deliver Barcelona on time. But AMD spokesman Phil Hughes said Monday that "we're still on track" for a Barcelona launch in the third quarter. Constellation is targeting IBM, which held an industry-leading 47.8 percent market share on the earlier Top 500 list, because its Blue Gene line is "the fastest machine out there," Bechtolsheim acknowledged. But Sun's Constellation is built with open industry standard components, such as x64 processors, Sun blade servers, Sun Fire x4500 storage, and open source Solaris or Linux operating system software, while IBM's Blue Gene is built from custom-made components. "Our observation is that industry standard open architecture has caught up with special-purpose computers. That's what we really mean to say here," Bechtolsheim said. Sun believes that building a supercomputer from custom parts takes too much time and costs too much money to build. But building a custom machine may allow IBM to pull further ahead of the rest of the field. IBM claims in a news release that the coming Blue Gene/P has triple the performance of version L, including a potential top processing speed of 3 petaflops (P flops). A petaflop is 1,000 trillion flops (floating-point operations per second), a measure of how many computer calculations can be made in that time. Sun says the Constellation features a total 131,072 processor cores, can operate at up to 1.08 petaflops, has 100TB of memory, and an input-output (I/O) speed (the speed at which data can be moved in and out of the central processing unit) of 3TBps. A terabyte is 1 trillion bytes. The Top 500 supercomputers list, compiled by university researchers in the U.S. and Germany, ranks supercomputer systems that are usually operated in government or university research centers in the U.S., Europe and Asia. Sun is in the process of building a Constellation supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computer Center (TACC) at the University of Texas in Austin. The TACC received a $59 million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation in 2006 to build the supercomputer.
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New high-end dual-core Opterons will power servers.
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(InfoWorld) - The Web hosting company chosen to power the Web sites for this weekend's Live Earth concerts adopts an environmentally friendly business plan: Let the sunshine in. Affordable Internet Services Online (AISO) has been hired to power the Web sites from its 100 percent solar-powered Web hosting facility in Romoland, California, north of San Diego. The company's green philosophy fits with the theme of the concerts to raise awareness of the issue of global climate change. The concerts are to be held around the clock July 7 in Shanghai, Tokyo, London, New York, and other cities. Organizers of the Live Earth event say the concert venues will be carbon neutral with electricity to power musicians' amplifiers and microphones coming from renewable energy sources. AISO has been using the renewable energy of the sun to power its data center since 2001, said Phil Nail,Â CTO for the 10-year-old company. AISO will operate two Live Earth sites, one for the concert and the other to track pledges. Live Earth is not seeking financial donations but asks people to pledge to adopt a carbon-neutral lifestyle. The company installed 14 IBM BladeCenter servers powered by AMD Opteron dual-core processors to host the sites. Each of the servers uses about 142 watts of electricity, which Nail considers more energy efficient than average. Low-end servers, including blades, run at an average of 218 watts, and midrange servers run at an average of 638 watts, according to figures from a 2007 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory study. Because these are the first Live Earth concerts, organizers have no idea how much traffic to expect at the Web sites, he said. The concert will be televised, and viewers will be invited to make pledges on the AISO-hosted pledge sites. Later, the names of those who pledged will appear on TV. Other Web hosting companies advertise themselves as "green," Nail said, but they often simply buy carbon offsets rather than actually improve their own energy efficiency. Affordable Internet also has installed solar tubes, shafts that run from the roof of a building to the ceiling in a room, to light the data center's interior. It also irrigates a rooftop garden with recycled water from the data center's cooling system. Affordable Internet, with 15,000 customers, has attracted prospective customers from as far away as the U.K. to host their Web sites because they are seeking out carbon-neutral hosting services.
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(Source: Nexsan)  Can your data center meet your growing storage needs without breaking the bank? Do you have the power and cooling capacity neccessary to meet the demands of today's high-density equipment? Is is necessary to trade off performance and accessibility for storage density and energy efficiency?Attend this live Webcast, featuring Nexsan CTO and co-founder Gary Watson, for expert insight on "green storage" and learn what high capacity, energy-efficient storage systems can do for you, with topics including: - Cost-effectively conquering ever growing amounts of data - Reducing storage power costs by a factor of 10 - Simple, software transparent energy savings - Highest drive capacity equals smaller, more efficient footprint - Performance and efficiency - not mutually exclusive! - Leveraging green storage to reduce total operating costs and carbon footprint year after yearThis webcast will air on Thursday, June 28th 2007, at 2:00 PM, EDT.
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Netra: Now with 64 threads Congratulations go out to Sun Microsystems for doing its best to make a new NEBS box seem exciting. Sun will ship you a NEBS server that supports 64 software threads, don't ya know.â¦
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Think disk made out of trees Technology Forum HP is going greener than a green thing from a green land with its latest storage boxesâ¦
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Sun Microsystems Inc. (SUNW.O: Quote, Profile, Research) and the University of Texas at Austin are set to flip the switch on Friday on a unique supercomputer that will vastly speed
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OCTOBER 14, 2004 (MACCENTRAL) - At a private viewing at Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto, Calif., Apple Computer Inc. today unveiled a new 750-square-foot &quot;mini&quot; design for its retail store.
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Sun&#39;s COO Jonathan Schwartz has outlined a new direction for his company in the form of a cycle farm. Such a farm would rent out CPU time by the hour for a nominal charge - 99 cents for the use of a dual CPU
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Sun Microsystems announced today that its hardware will power the largest supercomputer ever built, weighing in with 62,976 CPU cores and 504 teraflops of performance.