Sun Project Blackbox in Canberra
Today I went to a Sun Project Blackbox walk through and must say I am pretty impressed, now I have some experience building special purpose transportable networks and have been involved in the creation of some of these types of projects going back to the late 90's. Now one of these pictured right is a little down and dirty in comparison to the very sterile, very polished and may I say well appointed Sun version but it is also 10ish years earlier too, note the now dinosaur looking Compaq Servers, the CRT Monitor etc. Note also the twin Air Conditioners mounted on top.
I remember on of our biggest problems with building a container that scaled was the cooling which the Blackbox seems to have solved in quite an elegant manner. The idea is to use chilled water to enable heat dissipation through heat exchangers mounted between each rack. The first rack of servers get feed with cool air that flows through just like a traditional rack but the warm air is blown through the next heat exchanger which provides cooled air to the next server rack, all the racks are mounted in a straight line 4 racks each side. The absence of front and rear rack doors allows each server to have air flow as the Server Manufacturer designed it, no hotspots, meaning you could easily go floor to ceiling with 1RU Servers for very high density. This is very well thought out.
Sun was talking about some to the deployment scenarios including how some customers put chilled water plants as well as power supply / UPS in a second container delivered next to the Blackbox unit.
With a bit of extra thought you could extend to a situation where an office and / or some accommodation could be mounted on top of the Blackbox and plant room containers. The ones I have pictured here are made by Simply Containers Australia and are made in South Australia.
