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Sun Microsystems Project Blackbox

March 30th, 2007

Sun Microsystems Project Blackbox made a tour stop at the University of St. Thomas‘ Minneapolis campus earlier this week, and Technology Evangelist was there to cover it.

Project Blackbox is a portable data center built in a standard sized shipping container. It is a completely self contained system that is designed to give businesses flexibility and portability to their infrastructure. Initial uses mentioned include military (portability) and education (speed and flexibility tied to grants).

Full Transcript:

Bob Schilmoeller: My name is Bob Schilmoeller, I am on the project Blackbox
team and I would like to show you around the Blackbox today.

Looking into the Blackbox itself, one of the cool things that we have actually
done is, we put some sun SPOT sensors down in the lower part of the container
as well as in the container itself on various racks in this such and this is
to use to test for shock and vibe acceleration and also with temperature and
humidity. One of the things that you want to figure out what happens to
this as its gone in its tour, it gone for about seven and half weeks,
then what we found is we ready and enabled about our 3.5G drop or vibration
with this system. As we talk a little bit more, we will talk about some of the
capabilities of the Blackbox with the shock and vibe.

So, the other thing I want to just talk about is the power, we have redundant
power grids, so we have one on each side power panels with that, we can
connect on the outside of the Blackbox, either side we can do two grids with
that.

The other thing we have on the outside of the Blackbox is we have the network
and we have the chilled water, we can again, it’s redundant on each side.

So, why don’t we look inside this first entry of the Blackbox? What you will
see is, we have exposed an Air Plenum, where the air actually circulates
through the Blackbox, project Blackbox that actually comes from one side,
comes out of a rack that’s hot goes around, goes into a heat exchanger where
its actually cooled with the chilled water from there the cool water goes into
the next rack, it gets heated up with that rack of computers comes out and
it’s the process is repeated.

We step inside the Blackbox, what we see is, at the top is the overhead cable
management, we have room in the trays for many-many cables, hundreds of cables
actually and from that cable tray it actually branches off into articulated
cable trays that you can see that attached to each rack to manage the cables.
So, as the rack is pulled out, the cables are kept nice and neat and kept
inline as they are pulled out.

As I was mentioning on other end, we have the front to back air cooling, where
the air is comes through a heat exchanger its cool that goes into the unit,
into the rack that the air is heated from the systems goes into the next one
is cool and it goes in a circular fashion.

OK, so to move out the racks, we have a rack service tool that we can just
pullout into the isle and move from rack to rack, when its out in
the isle we can actually change the lever and change in directions for
the rack and roll up and down the isle for actually when we load the pay
load in and we bring the rack in, we can fill a rack outside of the
Blackbox, bring it in and use this tool to bring it down the isle and then we
can change and roll it into its location.

So, once it’s in the location, we attach and run the cables from the cable
management into the rack, if we need to service it, we can just put the lever
in the other direction and lift the 1,200 pounds that we have within that rack
and just pull the rack out. Once we pull the rack out, we have access to the
servers and we can make any sorts of service repairs that we need to the
actual equipment.

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