![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The ultimate in mobile computing?
2006-10-18 02:25 pmSun's Project Blackbox -- datacenter in a container - Engadget
We're typically not of the ilk to bust out a post on a Sun datacenter solution or yet another clustered supercomputer, but technically Sun's Project Blackbox is portable -- if you consider a shipping container portable. We wouldn't believe it if it were anyone else, but the gimmick here is Project Blackbox is a shock mounted transportable datacenter capable of accommodating up to 250 Sun Fire T1000s or x64 servers, with up to 7 terabytes of memory and as many as 1.5 petabytes of disk or 2 petabytes of tape storage -- just supply water and power, and the thing will run on its own.Old-timers may recall the ancient quip about the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes...
Remember what I've been saying about the relative growth rates of storage and network bandwidth?
As I mentioned recently in a comment to a post on Groklaw, the bandwidth of a carrier pigeon is nothing to sneeze at. If you figure that a bird can carry two SD cards, which are up to 4GBytes these days, then a 1-hour trip will carry north of 8MBits/sec, or about 8 times the bandwidth of a T1 line.
I'm still waiting to hear that Google is trucking data around to synchronize their server farms. A couple of years, I'd guess.
