Sun Project Blackbox / Portable Data Center

Mon Oct 15 06:04:58 UTC 2007

>On 15/10/2007, at 12:05 AM, Simon Lyall wrote:
> As for where the Blackboxes will be used, It'll be where companies  
>> want
>> servers in place in weeks or months and existing datacenters are  
>> full or
>> in the wrong place. Think of a building full of people processing
>> insurance claims in India or a cluster delivering video on demand  
>> in each
>> Asian city with more than 500,000 people.
>
>Or say, lots of processing somewhere short term - like video editing/ 
>rendering/whatever at the Olympic games.

That kind of work is better suited to a central location where your
editing/rendering/whatever staff is established and non-transient.  In the
film industry, the people on set are largely local to the set and are there
to run the lights, electrical, camera, etc.  The editing goes on back in the
studio.

Still, there are good uses for this kind of platform.  Perhaps in cases
where the amount of data to be captured outstrips the ability/bandwidth
available to transmit that data back in (near) realtime?

The seismic / geophone industry (if that's what it's called) has a box like
this they have used for years.  It has a satellite uplink for data
transmission back to base after gathering large amounts of data from
geophones.  The processing of that data is done back at home base.

Lorell