Sun Modular Datacenter (Sun MD, known in the prototype phase asProject Blackbox) is a portabledata center built into a standard 20-footintermodal container (shipping container), manufactured and marketed bySun Microsystems (acquired in 2010 byOracle Corporation). A data center of up to 280servers could be rapidly deployed using existing standardized transport methods to locations that might not be suitable for a building or other structure, and connecting it to the requiredinfrastructure (including an external chiller and power source).[1] Sun stated that the system could be made operational for 1% of the cost of building a traditional data center.[2]
The goal, as conceived byGreg Papadopoulos and Dave Douglas fromSun Labs andDanny Hillis fromApplied Minds, was to design the largest possible "thumb drive" that could still be easily transported worldwide by truck, rail, or air. Since intermodal container transportation infrastructure exists in nearly every country, their answer was a 20-foot standard shipping container, modified to support eight 40RUcompute racks populated with servers, storage, and other equipment. The initial target markets included secure portable data centers, and disaster relief to allow Internet access for email and insurance forms.
The prototype build was hosted at the Applied Minds facility, managed by Adam Yates from Applied Minds and Russ Rinfret from Sun. The prototype was first announced as "Project Blackbox" in October 2006;[3] a Project Blackbox with 1088AMD Opteron processors ranked #412 on the June 2007TOP500 list.[4] The product was officially announced in January 2008.[5]
On 14 July 2007, theSLAC National Accelerator Laboratory deployed a Sun MD containing 252Sun Fire X2200 compute nodes as a compute farm.[6][7]
In March 2009, theInternet Archive migrated its digital archive into a Sun MD, hosted atSun's Santa Clara headquarters campus,[8] a realization of a paper written by Archive employees in late 2003 proposing "an outdoor petabyteJBODNAS box" of sufficient capacity to store the then-current Archive in a 40' shipping container.[9]
Other customers includedRadboud University.[10]
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