* Where do you plug Sun’s data center-in-a-box, and other questions
Sun recently previewed its data center on wheels for quickly growing businesses that don’t have to time to build out data centers.
The data center in a box consists of a shipping container – the kind you see on the top of train cars – that comes provisioned with racks of servers, storage and other network gear.
I wrote about it in a server newsletter several weeks ago and I recently received an e-mail from a reader who questioned the smartness of this product. That got me thinking about how exactly Sun’s data center-in-a-box would work.
Imagine taking delivery of this data center. Would Sun just drop it in your parking lot, where you attach power, cooling and air conditioning? Does Sun expect you to run transaction-intensive tasks on it? Are you expected to install mission-critical Oracle databases and entrust their security to a data center located in a shipping container, in a parking lot, next to someone’s 15-year-old Ford Bronco?
Is the data center-in-a-box realistic too for growing businesses that may need to add more computing resources? How do you add another data center in a box when you need it? Do you take a blow-torch and cut a doorway into the side of the crate when you need to expand to a second crate, or do you walk out the end of one box and into the other? Does that sound like easy scalability to you?
We know that laptops are easy to steal, but what’s to prevent your competitor from bringing in an 18-wheeler and carting it off in the middle of the night?
I mean give me a break – it doesn’t sound like a particularly well thought through approach to me. Convince me otherwise. E-mail me.
