Rackable's datacenter in a box, part deux

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You may recall back earlier this year when Sun introduced its Blackbox datacenter in a shipping container concept, followed quickly by Rackable’s announcement of their concentro product. Good times.

Sun continues to clip along with their Blackbox, and has announced one customer (the Stanford Linear Accelerator folks). Meanwhile Rackable, which claims one customer but won’t announce who it is, has just started talking about v 2.0 of its container, the ICE Cube. Oddly, it’s not cubical:

Rackable logoRackable Systems, Inc….unveiled ICE Cube, the company’s new modular data center environment. Designed to augment or replace traditional data centers of any size, ICE Cube features computing density levels of up to 11,200 processing cores or up to 4.1 Petabytes of storage in a standard 40’ x 8’ ISO shipping container

The Register’s analysis shows that Rackable’s new solution beats the pants of Sun’s, in terms of paper specs anyway

Spec hounds will take note of the 28 racks (1400U) of servers or 4.1PB of storage that can fit in an ICE Cube. You can mix and match too.

Sun’s very similar Blackbox container only holds 7 racks of servers and 1.5PB of storage. Rackable also claims an 80 per cent cooling reduction, as compared to a 20 per cent reduction over a comparable data center from Sun.

Yes, I’ve said it before, but it’s still true: Rackable’s solution is prettier than Sun’s.

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  1. […] BlackBox datacenter in a box products out to Reno for tours at SC07. We’ve covered BlackBox [and several competing products] several times in the past [here, here]. Wander over to the Sun booth on Tuesday, November 13 for […]