Project Blackbox
Feb 18th, 2007 by Nick
So about 4 months ago Sun announced Project Blackbox. basically they took a shipping container and turned it into a portable server farm/data center. I was reading an article and it got me thinking. How great would this be for the FTTP Players. Instead of spending months figuring out where to put the CO, figuring out how many square feet you will need, building it and then running fiber to it you could instead have one of these, pre-configured with all the equipment you would need. Load your softswitch in there, crossconnects, GPS timeclock, servers, switches, routers and your fiber equipment. Have it all pre-configured, load the servers up, have everything ready to go so that while your plant is being built all you need to do is drive up with a truck, unload and plug in. Since it would be a stationary thing you could even have your fiber patch panels pre-configured, once the site is setup then your fiber guys simply start patching the fibers together just as they would in any other greenfield build-out. The other cool thing is that if you went into an area that was larger you could configure this however you needed. If you don’t need the softswitch then you simply don’t put that in and instead put in whatever else you want, you have 8 racks to do pretty much whatever you want. If you have a site that needs more capacity you bring in another container, set it up and away you go, the other thing that’s cool is that you can either stack these side by side or go up and save even more space. Now, there are a few downsides that I see to this. First, no matter what people try to say it’s still a shipping container, these things are ugly, nuff said! Second, how long does a shipping container last in regards to metal rusting out and things like that? I’m sure there would be some maintenance involved. Looks like they will be in Denver on April 13th, might have to see if I can go check it out.
