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Project Blackbox will be easily transported using common shipping methods. Simple hookups for water, AC power, and networking will enable customers to quickly deploy Project Blackbox upon delivery. Customers will be able to order a variety of standard and custom configurations of systems, storage, networking, and software.

Headed toward productization in mid-2007, Project Blackbox engineers the cost, complexity, and rigidity out of legacy datacenters. By applying Sun's trademark innovation to the constraints of the traditional datacenter, Project Blackbox delivers four unique advantages:

• An "instant-on" and rapid deployment advantage
• Breakthrough economics from scalability, use of standard components, cooling innovation, and lower cost to build
• A 100 percent virtualized infrastructure that lets customers build once, deploy anywhere
• The convenience and flexibility of deploying a virtualized datacenter when and where needed

Datacenter in a Shipping Container?
While there's an incredible amount of innovation that's gone into the design, it's important to understand how critical the standard shipping container is to this concept. The shipping container we know and love today was invented in the 1950s by a man from North Carolina named Malcom McLean. The first ship, named Ideal-X, was a converted WWII transport vessel that sailed from the port of New Jersey to Houston.

Two things link this work to Project Blackbox. First is the economic discontinuity caused by the idea. Prior to the standard container, it cost $5.86 per ton to load a ship. Afterwards the cost dropped to $0.16 per ton!

The other bridge to the past wasn't about the container itself, but about what Malcom did next. In 1956, Malcom patented his container design. But instead of holding onto them and trying to sue anyone who copied the idea, he submitted the design to ISO and gave the organization a royalty-free license. Today we'd call that enlightened, but back then it was just plain crazy.

Yet it worked, and today there are over 18 million shipping containers in use worldwide. But Malcom must have known that challenges of having to compete in the open market was well worth the trouble if the open standards made that market huge.

Use Scenarios for Campus Deployment
The modular nature of Project Blackbox will allow Education customers to tap its benefits in an endless variety of deployment environments. Some scenarios could include:

• A campus datacenter struggling to keep pace with growth could rapidly build a datacenter and place it next to an inexpensive, green energy source
• An urban campus could place a container in a suburban or rural warehouse, on a rooftop, or in a parking garage where space is more abundant or less expensive. This would allow the campus to increase datacenter capacity without having to undertake the cost and complexity of building a new class-A facility.
• Countries looking to expand their ICT training capability in underserved areas could leverage Project Blackbox's easy management and support for up to 10,000 simultaneous desktop users — without administrators — to bring computing to remote villages and quickly mobilize IT systems.
• In the event of a natural disaster, schools could move data and applications away from the disaster site confidently by taking advantage of Project Blackbox's powerful, ruggedized design.

Inside Project Blackbox
The Project Blackbox prototype is a computing powerhouse capable of hosting a configuration that would place it among the top 200 fastest supercomputers globally. The current prototype could support the following capacities:

• A single Project Blackbox could accommodate 250 Sun Fire T1000 servers with CoolThreads technology, with 2000 cores and 8000 simultaneous threads
• A single Project Blackbox could accommodate 250 x64-based servers with 1000 cores
• A single Project Blackbox could provide as much as 1.5 petabytes of disk storage or 2 petabytes of energy-efficient tape storage
• A single Project Blackbox could provide 7 terabytes of memory
• A single Project Blackbox could handle up to 10,000 simultaneous desktop users
• A single Project Blackbox has sufficient power and cooling to support 200 kilowatts of rackmounted equipment

Sun is ready to take you on a tour of the world's first virtualized datacenter. To learn even more about the breakthrough innovation and benefits Project Blackbox will soon deliver, please visit sun.com/blackbox or contact Sun.

Questions or comments? Please email education_news@sun.com