http://www.sun.com/emrkt/blackbox/index.jsp
Excellent idea. Not sure how many people will buy it, but it's an excellent idea. DR and spike capaticy will be it's key markets. They tout some others on the website, but I don't think they'll take off so much. The remote datacenter locations idea is intriguing. The oil rig example, for instance. Questing is, is the container or the bandwidth more expensive? The DR target is a no brainer. I'd bet Sungard and DR-services companies like that buy a few hundred of these. I like it from a spike capacity perspective too. Imagine if your CNN and you know you're about to get creamed from a computing perspective this November for the election... 1-800-sun-0404 to the rescue. Especially with their AMD offerings. 7 racks loaded up with 8-socket/16-core AMD boxes with VMware ESX. I'm giddy just thinking about it.
The comments on digg.com were pretty good.
http://digg.com/design/Sun_to_unveil_Project_Blackbox_Datacenter_in_a_Container
"This is brilliant! Way to go sun. I think I'll purchase one, bury it in my backyard, create a nice little sewer tunnel down to it and really truly work from home"
http://digg.com/tech_news/Photos_Sun_s_Project_Blackbox
"Did they make room for a sleeping bag between the racks?
If so i wonder how many geeks will trade their house in."
And
"Yeah imagine how easy these would be to steal! You know if you happen to have a flat-bed truck with a small crane and some where nice and safe to store it.
Heh - good idea though, it's kind of like a really large blade(tm) for the internet. Just connect a bunch of these together and you're good to go."
Slashdot had it's usual gems:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/06/10/17/135214.shtml
"One week ago, Jonathan Schwartz (CEO of Sun) declared the death of the datacenter [sun.com], as discussed on Slashdot [slashdot.org].
Now they've put in a box for burial?"
My apologies to the comment writers, I'm to lazy to attribute or link directly....
